Kashmir

NEW DELHI, India --Thirty-five Hindus were killed in recent days in two incidents in the Indian-administered portion of the disputed Kashmir province, police said yesterday. The killings were believed to be the work of Islamist militants, days before a meeting of the Indian prime minister with Kashmiri separatists. In one incident, gunmen stormed a village in a district called Doda, dragged Hindu villagers from their homes and shot 22 to death. In another, in neighboring Udhampur district, suspected militants kidnapped 13 villagers from a remote mountainous spot; four of their bodies were found lying in the woods late Sunday and the rest were discovered yesterday, according to police.

NEW DELHI, India - After eight months of slow progress toward lasting peace, foreign ministers from India and Pakistan met yesterday to search for solutions to their main dispute, the 57-year-old conflict over the divided territory of Kashmir. Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh and his Pakistani counterpart, Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri, met yesterday, the first day of a two-day summit, and spokesmen for both sides said the talks went well without giving any details. Although the two nations are discussing a range of issues, Pakistan wants to keep the focus on Kashmir.

CHAKOTHI, Pakistan - One mile high in the Himalayan foothills, Pakistani Army Lt. Col. Nauman Saeed peered through binoculars, searching for his enemies on the other side of a deep ravine. "Look! Look! There they are," he said, handing off his binoculars to a group of journalists visiting the Line of Control, the heavily armed border dividing the disputed province of Kashmir between India and Pakistan. Sure enough, five Indian soldiers standing together behind a stone wall came into focus.

SRINAGAR, India - The last words Parveena Akhter heard from her son, Javed, before soldiers forced him into a jeep at 3 o'clock one morning were these: "Save me! Save me!" The Kashmir Valley had descended into violence and separatists were setting off bombs and shooting at Indian soldiers. Akhter rushed to the police station the next morning and demanded to know where her son was. "I thought that they wouldn't harm him because he wasn't involved in anything," said Akhter, sitting cross-legged on a green wool rug on the floor of Javed's old room.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- President Pervez Musharraf pushed for a compromise settlement of the Kashmir conflict yesterday, telling Indians in a televised interview that he is prepared to give up territorial claims in the 59-year-old conflict if India will reciprocate. Frustrated by what he says is the Indian government's slow response to his months-old proposals, Musharraf stepped up a media campaign in India by giving an interview to a prominent private channel, NDTV. But his appearance caused "scant ripples" in India's government, the Times of India newspaper reported.

WAGAH, Pakistan -- A golden bus crossed from India to Pakistan yesterday bearing an old rival and the hopes of a subcontinent tired of war.Prime Minster Atal Bihari Vajpayee rode in from India to meet his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, spurring talk that a trans-border bus route might open a new era of friendliness between the historic enemies.Vajpayee and Sharif planned two days of meetings aimed at bridging the differences between the world's two newest nuclear-armed states. The Indian prime minister's foray across the border unfolded amid pageantry, turning an ordinarily hostile border post into a platform for peacemaking.

URI, India - Sajad Ahmad Lone flipped through a photo album of 22 pictures, of his cousin in a pilot's cap, of his only living uncle in owl-like glasses. He looked at weddings and babies. He recited the names of his relatives, memorized from the backs of their photographs. They were strangers. These people lived only about 200 miles away, but for Lone, sitting in his family's restaurant in a border town of Indian-controlled Kashmir, they could be on the other side of the world. He met just a few of them when he was a child, when his family made its only trip to Pakistan.

WHILE THE White House focuses on the nuclear crisis in North Korea and the ever-increasing likelihood of war in Iraq, the great dangers that lurk in the Kashmir conflict are being overlooked. This 55-year-old conflict between India and Pakistan directly threatens vital security U.S. interests because it could escalate into the world's first nuclear war. After the vigorous U.S. military, diplomatic and allied responses to the terrorist acts of Sept. 11, 2001, it was widely expected that global acts of terrorism would diminish.

NEW DELHI, India - India demanded yesterday that the Pakistan government shut down the Pakistan-based militant group that claimed responsibility for Monday's attack in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, which killed at least 38 people. It also asked the United States to outlaw the group and to freeze its assets, as Washington has with other terrorist outfits since the attacks Sept. 11 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, speaking after talks with India's foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, said that the U.S. campaign against terrorism would focus on Kashmiri militants as well the al-Qaida group of Osama bin Laden, the primary suspect in the U.S. attacks.

NEW DELHI, India - U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that he had "seen indications" that al-Qaida was operating in the disputed Kashmir region, but he cautioned that there was no concrete intelligence on the numbers or nationality of the fighters. Rumsfeld has spoken previously of possible al-Qaida infiltration into Kashmir, but his comments came after a day of talking with Indian leaders in an effort to help find a path away from war between India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed rivals that have placed 1 million troops on their border.