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India steps up fencing along Kashmir border

AFP, Baras Post
The Indian army said yesterday it was taking advantage of a truce with Pakistan to step up fencing of the divided border in Kashmir to prevent Islamic rebels from crossing.
"We have intensified fencing since the ceasefire. We are now able to work in a more vigorous manner, " Brigadier Rajinder Singh told reporters at the snow-patched Baras Post overlooking the Pakistani zone of Kashmir, 170km northwest of Indian Kashmir's summer capital Srinagar.
"The fencing is going to be very, very effective. Until now the terrorists have not been able to breach it anywhere," said Singh, who is in charge of army opera-
tions in northern Kashmir.
The nine-foot (2.7-meter) barbed-wire fence is stretched out along iron pillars next to antipersonnel mines set to detonate if anyone manages to sneak over.
Singh said Indian forces had fenced 190km of the 460-km Line of Control, the de facto border with Pakistan in the disputed province, and that fencing would be complete by mid-2004.
"At some stretches it can't be laid now because of snowfall and other conditions. We will lay fencing there afterwards," Singh said.
He said that once the fence is complete, the infiltration of rebels "would significantly come down."
India and Pakistan have been observing a historic ceasefire over the LoC and their mutually recog-
nized border in Kashmir since November 26, halting nearly daily artillery skirmishes.
Singh said there have been no violations of the truce.
India accuses Pakistan of arming and training separatist guerrillas, many of them nonKashmiris, and providing them artillery cover to cross the frontier.
Pakistan denies the charge, saying it provides only moral and political support to an "indigenous" uprising inside India's sole Muslim-majority state.
The border ceasefire does not apply to the Islamic insurgency inside Indian Kashmir, which has claimed more than 40,000 lives, according to Indian official figures. Separatists and Pakistan put the death toll between 80,000 and 100,000.