INDIA: India yesterday accused Pakistan of "sponsoring" an attack in the disputed northern Jammu and Kashmir state in which 27 Hindu labourers, including 13 women and a child, were killed and 28 others critically injured as they sat huddled around a communal radio listening to an international cricket match.
Eyewitnesses said five gunmen, some dressed in the saffron robes worn by Hindu mendicants to avoid suspicion, struck Kasim Nagar a poor Hindu neighbourhood. "It is evident that this is inspired by Pakistan," the Foreign Minister, Mr Yashwant Sinha, told a local television news channel, ahead of the emergency meeting of the cabinet committee on security chaired by the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee.
The cabinet committee condemned Saturday night's attack, but stopped short of blaming Islamabad.
Security officials in Delhi privately admit that India is keen to "downplay" Kashmir's latest militant killings as it does not want to raise tensions with nuclear rival Pakistan, with whom it came close to war last month over a similar terrorist strike on a nearby military garrison in May.
That attack, in which 34 people died, almost led to India declaring war on its nuclear neighbour. The two sides had amassed over a million soldiers along their common frontier. The two armies were mobilised after last December's suicide strike by five gunmen on the Indian parliament, an attack New Delhi blamed on Pakistan.
"The government will take a view of the situation after making a detailed assessment and take parliament into \ confidence," the newly appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, Mr Lal Krishna Advani, said before leaving for Jammu to review the security situation.
Indian security officials are believed to have told the US and Britain - whose intervention averted war with Pakistan - that Delhi's response to attacks such the one in Jammu would be "calibrated and circumspect ".
"India cannot afford to have a knee-jerk response and place its forces on high alert against Pakistan every time there is a militant attack in Kashmir ," a senior security official said. "We need to take a broader view of the situation, remain vigilant and defeat terrorism on the ground," he added.
Nobody has claimed responsibility for Saturday's attack, but Kashmir's police chief, Mr A. K. Suri, said the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) militant group was to blame. He said the police engaged the militants in a firefight before they fled into the nearby jungle. He said the police had launched a massive effort to capture them.
Junior Interior Minister, Mr I.D. Swamy, also blamed Pakistan for the attack and said that until Islamabad ended "cross-border terrorism, such innocent killings can happen any time, any place, wherever they [the militants] find soft targets". He said that until Pakistan closed down its terrorist training camps, such massacres would be repeated.
Kashmir's Chief Minister, Mr Farooq Abdullah, said cross-border terrorism would not end by itself. It would continue until the international community united to fight it, he said.
India blames Pakistan for fuelling terrorism in Kashmir, which is divided between the two but claimed by both. Under pressure from the US, Britain and other Western governments, Pakistan's President, Gen Pervez Musharraf, promised last month to "permanently and visibly " end support to Kashmiri separatist groups fighting Indian control over Kashmir by closing down terrorist training camps and freezing the assets of militants.
The British Foreign Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, who arrives in New Delhi later this week as part of continuing diplomatic efforts to ease India-Pakistan tensions, said he was "horrified" by the attack in Jammu. "Such incidents only serve to renew the determination of the free world to fight the evil of terrorism," he told the BBC.
Pakistan also condemned the killings, saying that the "motivation behind the attack seems to be to enhance tension in the region".