Pakistan on Thursday released 113 Indian fishermen after a similar gesture by New Delhi was announced to mark the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The fishermen, who had been kept in a Karachi jail for nine months to a year, were put on a train bound for the eastern border city of Lahore from where they will cross back to their home country.

Police in India said Thursday they had arrested the main suspect in the rape of an elderly nun that sent shockwaves through the country's Christian community.

The nun, who is in her 70s, needed surgery after the attack in March, when a gang of robbers broke into the convent school where she lived in the eastern state of West Bengal.

Shops and schools shut down in parts of Indian Kashmir on Wednesday to protest against a string of apparently targeted killings that has triggered fear in the restive region.

Hundreds of police and paramilitary troops in riot gear patrolled Kashmir's mostly deserted main city of Srinagar after separatist groups called a strike over the killings which they have blamed on undercover security forces.

Unidentified gunmen shot dead a former militant in Indian-administered Kashmir on Monday, the fourth apparently targeted killing in a week in the restive Himalayan region.

Police said the attackers shot Aijaz Ahmed Reshi near his home in Sopore, 45 kilometers (28 miles) northwest of the main city of Srinagar, triggering panic among residents.

Nuclear armed states continue to upgrade their stockpiles despite an international trend towards disarmament, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported Monday. 

Between 2010 and 2015 the number of warheads fell from 22,600 to 15,850 according to the institute's annual disarmament report which said the U.S. and Russia represented the bulk of the reduction.

Two accidents killed nearly 40 people in India on Saturday, including one in which a van full of pilgrims plunged into a river, in the latest deadly crashes on some of the world's most dangerous roads.

Twenty-two people, including seven children, were killed when a van carrying Hindus returning from a pilgrimage to the famous Tirupati-Tirumala temple in southeastern Andhra Pradesh state lost control on a bridge.

At least 16 passengers were electrocuted Friday and 27 others injured after their bus hit a high-voltage power line in the western Indian state of Rajasthan, police said.

The private bus was carrying more than 50 members of a wedding party when it came in contact with a loose overhead wire running across the road in Pachewar area of Tonk district, 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the state capital Jaipur.

Amnesty International called Wednesday for an investigation into the killing of a journalist in northern India who had accused a local politician of being involved in land grabs and corruption. 

Jagendra Singh, a freelance journalist, died on Monday, a week after he was set alight in Uttar Pradesh state shortly after publishing an article and posting allegations on Facebook against local minister Ram Murti Singh Verma.

Myanmar on Wednesday denied media reports that Indian forces had attacked insurgents inside its territory and said it would not tolerate rebel groups using its soil to attack neighbors.

Earlier this week New Delhi said its forces had hunted down a rebel group operating in the mountainous forests of Manipur state, close to Myanmar's long western border.

Indian forces Tuesday hunted down and inflicted "significant casualties" on rebel groups allegedly involved in the killing of 20 soldiers in the remote northeast of the country last week, officials said.

The army said it "engaged two separate groups of insurgents" in the mountainous forests close to the border with Myanmar after armed rebels ambushed a military convoy in Manipur state last Thursday, killing 20 and wounding 12 soldiers.