Defence Minister Khawaja Asif has called for an international investigation into the killing of 26 men at a tourist spot in India-occupied Kashmir this week as tensions between the neighbours rise, according to a New York Times report. The April 22 attack in Pahalgam saw 26 people, mostly tourists, killed in what is being described as the deadliest armed attack in the disputed Himalayan region since the year 2000. Responsibility for the attack was allegedly claimed by the hitherto unknown The Resistance Front (TRF). Since the incident, the nuclear-armed nations have unleashed a raft of measures against each other, with India unilaterally suspending the critical Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) and Pakistan retaliating by putting the Simla Agreement in abeyance and closing its airspace for Indian flights. India has implied cross-border linkages of the attackers, while Pakistan strongly denied any involvement. Asif told the NYT in an interview on Friday that Pakistan was “ready to cooperate” with “any investigation which is conducted by international inspectors”. The minister said India had used the aftermath of the militant attack as a pretext to suspend the IWT and for domestic political purposes. India was taking steps to punish Pakistan “without any proof, without any investigation”, he added. “We do not want this war to flare up, because flaring up of this war can cause disaster for this region,” Asif told the newspaper. Asif rebutted India’s allegations by asserting that the proscribed organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) was “defunct” and had no ability to plan or conduct attacks from Pakistan. “They don’t have any setup in Pakistan,” he told the NYT. “Those people, whatever is left of them, they are contained. Some of them are under house arrest, some of them are in custody. They are not at all active,” the minister said. According to NYT, Asif said the attack could have been a “false flag” operation carried out by the Indian government to provoke a crisis. The defence minister asserted that for the last decade, India had been trying to get out of the treaty, which has been a source of stability in the region. “They were creating excuses. They were creating problems that were not there,” he was quoted as saying. “They have now found an excuse to get out of this arrangement.” In a separate interview with Sky News, Asif had warned of an “all-out war” if India carried out any attack on Pakistan. “If there is an all-out attack or something like that, then obviously there will be an all-out war,” Asif said, adding that the world should be “worried” by the prospect of a full-scale military conflict in the region. Fire exchange at LoC for 2nd day Meanwhile, there were reports of Indian and Pakistani troops exchanging gunfire for a second straight day on Saturday across the Line of Control (LoC) as ties plummeted in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack. Yesterday, Syed Ashfaq Gilani, a government official in Azad Kashmir, had told AFP that troops exchanged fire along the line separating the two countries. “There was no firing on the civilian population,” he added. There was no immediate comment from the Pakistani military. India’s army confirmed there had been limited firing of small arms. According to Reuters, the Indian army today claimed its troops responded to “unprovoked” small arms fire from multiple Pakistan Army posts that started around midnight on Friday along the 740-kilometre LoC. No casualties were reported from the Indian side, it said. Among India’s aggressive measures announced on April 23 against Pakistan was the unilateral move to suspend the 1960 IWT, which was brokered by the World Bank and has endured through wars and decades of hostility. India also shut its borders and downgraded diplomatic ties over what its government and media claimed — without offering any evidence — was Islamabad’s alleged support for cross-border terrorism. The next day, the National Security Committee (NSC) in Islamabad announced Pakistan’s response — putting all trade, bilateral pacts and flights off-limits for its eastern neighbour. It also called on India to “refrain from its reflexive blame game and cynical, staged managed exploitation of incidents like Pahalgam to further its narrow political agenda”. As tensions rose between the nuclear powers, voices from across the world, including the United Nations, called on both countries to exercise restraint. While Saudi Arabia and Iran offered to mediate, United States President Donald Trump said he was confident that India and Pakistan would “get it figured out”. In a rather interesting remark, Trump said: “There have been tensions on that border for 1,500 years so, you know, it’s the same as it has been”. Since the attack, Trump and other US officials have offered India “full support” in hunting down the perpetrators of the violent incident.