NEW DELHI, March 31 (1995): A prominent Kashmiri  separatist leader has threatened to burn himself to death if New Delhi hold elections in the state to pick a local government, newspapers reported Friday. Yasin  Malik, who heads the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), told a huge rally in Kashmir's summer capital Srinagar on Thursday that he would not let New Delhi succeed in its poll plans. The proposal to hold elections "is a challenge to the pride of the Kashmiri people who have been...

SRINAGAR, March 30 (1995): A Kashmiri separatist leader threatened on Thursday to burn himself to death if the Indian government went ahead with plans to hold elections in the strife-torn region later this year. Yasin Malik, head of the pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), told supporters at the start of a three-day anti-poll campaign that any elections in Jammu and Kashmir state under Indian rule would be invalid. India's Chief Election...

SRINAGAR, March 29 (1995): Indian troops and Kashmiri separatist guerrillas fought for the second time in three days in a besieged holy town in the Himalayan region, but no one was injured, police said on Wednesday. Police said almost 90 percent of the population had fled Charar-e-sharief since Indian army and paramilitary troops surrounded it early this month to trap some 120 armed Islamic insurgents they believed were hiding there. They said more people fled the town, revered for its mausoleum of Kashmir's patron...

ISLAMABAD, March 26 (1995): Pakistan's ruling and opposition parties, in a rare show of unity, joined on Sunday in declaring support for militants fighting in Kashmir. Sixteen leaders of political parties and groups, including Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, had signed the declaration, parliamentary Kashmir committee chairman Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan said. "It will convey to the world community a message of consensus of the different political parties on the...

NEW DELHI, March 24 (1995): Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah said on Friday he would meet the head of right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to seek an end to a bloody separatist uprising in Kashmir. But a spokesman for BJP President Lal Krishan Advani denied any plans by the hard-line nationalist leader to meet Shah. "I will be meeting the leaders of the opposition during my next few days in New Delhi," Shah told Reuters. "I have a meeting with Mr Advani and others," he said. Shah said...

NEW DELHI, March 24 (1995): Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah said on Friday he would meet the head of India's rightwing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to seek an end to a bloody separatist uprising in the Himalayan region. But a spokesman for BJP President Lal Krishan Advani denied any plans by the hardline nationalist leader to meet Shah. "I will be meeting the leaders of the opposition during my next few days in New Delhi," Shah told Reuters. "I...

SRINAGAR, March 20 (1995): Moslem separatists killed an army brigadier and 11 other people in two blasts in the troubled Jammu and Kashmir province on Monday, police said. They said the brigadier, three junior officers, six other soldiers and two civilians died in two mine explosions at the same spot as an army convoy was passing near Uri, some 100 km (60 miles) west of the state's winter capital of Srinagar. Moslem militants have been waging a five-year-old war against New Delhi in mainly Hindu India's only Moslem...

NEW DELHI, March 18 (1995): Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah said on Saturday he had no plans to take part in elections in India's Jammu and Kashmir state. Shah told supporters in New Delhi that the time for elections in Kasmir had passed. "It is time to work out a lasting and a permanent solution to the Kashmir problem," the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency quoted Shah as saying. New Delhi has been fighting against separatist rebellion in Jammu and Kashmir -- India's only Moslem-majority state -- in...

SRINAGAR, March 18 (1995): Suspected Moslem guerrillas shot dead a former speaker of the Kashmir assembly on Friday as he emerged from a mosque after the traditional weekly prayers, the police said here. Meanwhile Indian troopers angered by the death of a colleague in a rebel attack fired indiscriminately in Anantnag, killing one militant and six civilians, police said. Wali Mohammad Itto was the first Kashmiri politician to be gunned down in the city of Jammu, where he had fled in 1990 to escape secessionist violence...

ISLAMABAD, March 17 (1995): Seven people were killed and one seriously wounded when a bomb exploded at the office of a Kashmiri militant organisation in Pakistan-administrated Kashmir on Friday, the Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) said. The official agency said the explosion occurred in the office of Hizab-ul-Momineen, a Kashmiri Shiite organisation in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Kashmir. The agency said members of the two groups of the organisation who had serious differences Friday assembled in the office to...