Pakistan Asks India to End Border Standoff

31/05/2001| IslamWeb

ISLAMABAD (Islamweb & News Agencies) - Pakistan urged India on Wednesday to pull its troops back to peacetime locations and said it would only move the ``bare minimum'' of its own forces to the border as tensions mounted between the two nuclear rivals.
A foreign ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan told CNN Islamabad did not want to aggravate the situation and would like to resolve differences through dialogue.
Khan called Pakistan's mobilization of its troops to the border only as a defensive measure.
Pakistan's top military spokesman, in another interview, rejected as lies Indian newspaper reports that Pakistan had moved ballistic missiles to the border.
Indian newspapers said Pakistan had moved medium-range ballistic missile batteries into forward areas, quoting un-named Indian sources.
Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes said in New Delhi the country's missile systems were ``in position,'' but did not elaborate.
As the Indian cabinet's security committee met Wednesday in New Delhi to decide the next step in the row sparked by the December 13 suicide attack on the Indian parliament, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf called for a peaceful resolution of problems between the two countries.
He made the remarks while briefing the Sindh province cabinet about the current Indo-Pakistan situation in the provincial capital and port city Karachi.
India blames the parliament attack on two Pakistan-based groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir and has demanded Islamabad crush them.
India has demanded Pakistan arrest leaders of Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba guerrilla groups, which it says were responsible for the attack on parliament in which 14 people died.
Both the groups deny any involvement.
India and Pakistan, which have fought three wars in barely half a century, have traded fire in the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir and bolstered forces along the frontier in the biggest build-up in almost 15 years.