KARGIL, India. July 6: Pakistani shells slammed into an oil tanker convoy on a crucial Indian highway Tuesday as fierce fighting over Kashmir mountain peaks continued despite an agreement in Washington that Pakistan would withdraw forces from India's side of a ceasefire line, reports AP.
US President Bill Clinton's meetings with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had raised hopes of a speedy end to the two-month battle in the snowcapped Himalayas.
But India says there has been no sign of withdrawal and no letup in the nearly ceaseless shelling from both sides of the 1972 ceasefire Une that divides Kashmir between the two nuclear powers.
"Many people are saying the war is over." Indian Interior Minister Lal Krishna Advani told a gathering of Hindu rightwing. activists in New Delhi. "I say no it is not over. The military operations will continue until the eviction of the last Pakistani intruder."
India says it is fighting Pakistani soldiers from six Northern Light Infantry battalions and hundreds of Islamic militants who want to separate Muslim-majority Kashmir from India.
Pakistan acknowledges its forces are trading constant artillery shelling and targeting a strategic Indian highway. Islamabad says its troops have
not crossed the frontier although the United States, Russia. Britain. Germany. France and other countries have re-
jected those denials and called on Pakistan to withdraw the forces.
When Pakistani shells
slammed into an oil tanker convoy on National Highway One. two of the trucks exploded in a ball of fire. Army engineers
worked to clear the obstacle while military and civilian vehicles were backed up for seven km on the only link between Kashmir's summer capital. Srinagar, and the remote battle zone.
India captured strategic peak 5,000-meter. (16.500-foot) Tiger Hill on Sunday to evict fighters who could direct Pakistani artillery fire onto the highway and Indian military camps. Although the shelling had diminished, the hit on the oil tankers indicated that there may still be hundreds of Islamic fighters on vantage points up to four km inside Indian territory.
But the Indian Army is now focused on Batalik, the most difficult of three major battlegrounds, where officers say up to 300 Islamic fighters are entrenched on steep, jagged ridges at high altitudes.
India says it has pushed the Intruders back three to four km all along the 140-km battle front since the heights were seized and stone bunkers were built in early May.
A Pakistani Army spokesman. Brig Rashid Quereshi, acknowledged his gunners still have a clear view of Tiger Hill and the highway and can target convoys.
Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif has not yet returned home after the meeting with Clinton in Washington. In Pakistan, a militant Muslim group whose members are fight-
ing in Kashmir warned the Pakistani prime minister not to make a deal with India.
US officials said the two had agreed that Pakistan would take "concrete steps" to withdraw its forces from across the Line of Control in Kashmir. But those steps were not publicly spelled out and Indian officials said there is no evidence of any change on the ground.
"Pakistan understands that where it is today militarily and internationally is in a blind ally," Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh said Monday on CNN. "There is only one way to rectify it: Turn back from what they have done."
India says 486 Pakistani soldiers and 150 Islamic guerillas have been killed in the fighting, while 265 Indian soldiers nave died, 451 were wounded and 22 are missing. But Pakistan and the guerillas have not provided recent casualty figures, and India's figures could not be confirmecf
Meanwhile, the two countries' diplomats continue to be detained in each other's capitals.
India said that Pakistan abducted embassy employee Yog Raj Vij from his car in Islamabad on Monday. On Tuesday. Pakistan said two of its embassy officials. Rao Akhtar Hussain and Mohammad Boota, were kidnapped from a New Delhi market and tortured by Indian intelligence officials.