Terrorist attacks in Kashmir have brought the two nuclear-armed South Asian countries to the brink of war, but Rumsfeld has added a new US worry: that al Qaeda fighters may try to provoke a war in the disputed territory.

"I have seen indications that there are in fact al-Qaeda operating in the area that we're talking about near the Line of Control," Rumsfeld said, referring to the de facto border dividing Indian and Pakistani Kashmir.

"I do not have hard evidence of precisely how many, who or where," he told reporters after talks in New Delhi with Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.

Rumsfeld was sent to India and Pakistan to cool tensions which neared boiling point following an attack by suspected Muslim militants last month near Kashmir's winter capital Jammu.

He said at a press conference before jetting off that the situation in the region was still tense, despite India on Monday saying there had been a decrease in infiltration into Kashmir and lifting a six-month ban on Pakistani flights over its territories.

New Delhi followed up the gesture on Tuesday by recalling warships that had been patrolling near Pakistani waters and also gave notice it was in the process of naming a new high commissioner (ambassador) to Pakistan.

How to build on those gestures was the subject of Rumsfeld's meeting with the Indian leadership, which included National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, Defence Minister George Fernandes and Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh.

They discussed the possibility of using US ground sensors in Kashmir to monitor and assess the movement of militants across the line of control, Rumsfeld said.

"Needless to say the goal is to see that there is not infiltration across the Line of Control and that there are not terrorist acts," he said.

Rumsfeld suggested getting US, British, Indian and Pakistani experts together to explore the available technologies, said a senior US defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Musharraf, who meets Thursday with Rumsfeld, took the first step toward easing tensions last week by pledging to stop infiltrations across the Line of Control permanently.

But Islamabad has described the Indian response as inadequate and called for more substantive measures to be taken to defuse the crisis that has seen about a million soldiers deployed by both sides on their frontiers.

"The Indian decisions do not address the main causes of tension," a Pakistani foreign office statement said Wednesday.

"We trust that the Indian government will soon announce further steps leading to the resumption of a meaningful dialogue on disputes between the two countries, especially the core issue of Kashmir."

Rumsfeld warned that the situation between the two war-ready neighbours remained tense.

"It has been a situation that has been tense and it continues to be a tense situation," he said.

A source at the Indian defense ministry, meanwhile, said two heavily armed al-Qaeda fighters were shot dead Sunday by Indian forces, who have been battling a 13-year-old insurgency that New Delhi accuses Islamabad of fomenting.

"There are reports of two groups of al-Qaeda having sneaked in but that needs to be confirmed," said Rajinder Bhullar, the Kashmir intelligence chief of India's paramilitary Border Security Force.

He said the groups comprises 40 to 50 men in northern and central Kashmir and that they had been heard speaking Arabic.

Rumsfeld did not answer directly on whether the United States wanted ground forces to go after al-Qaeda fighters in Kashmir.

"We are getting the cooperation of all kinds of countries across the globe in chasing the al-Qaeda and other global terrorist networks and in working with countries to see that their countries do not become havens for terrorists," he said.

He praised Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf for cooperating with the United States in rooting out al-Qaeda, noting that Islamabad had captured and turned over high-level al-Qaeda officials in the past.

Rumsfeld also saluted India's cooperation with the United States in the "war on terrorism" launched after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Shelling duels between Indian and Pakistani troops across the Line of Control, meanwhile, continued Wednesday, with Indian police reporting that one Indian soldier was killed and another injured in the exchanges.

All rights reserved. � 2002 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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