5, April 2005	Tuesday	25 Safar 1426

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SRINAGAR, April 4: Indian authorities have moved passengers due to take the first bus in decades between held Kashmir and Azad Kashmir to a heavily guarded complex in Kashmir’s main city, behind machinegun nests and razor wire. Anti-Indian militants have told Kashmiri families, desperate to reunite, not to ride the first bus service on Thursday along a twisting mountain road, warning it will become their “coffin”.

Thousands of Kashmiris on both sides of the border signed up for the first bus, but only 29 have been approved from the Indian side — and so far only three tickets have actually been sold.

“After the latest militant threat, 10 passengers travelling in the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus have been shifted to the TRC,” an official with India’s Jammu and Kashmir state government told Reuters on Monday, referring to the main tourist centre in Srinagar.

Another dozen or so passengers are being brought to Srinagar under tight security from the southern winter capital of Jammu.

Adding menace to their threat, the militants have published lists of the names and addresses of the first passengers to win seats on the service.

Police dressed in battle fatigues frisked people entering the Srinagar complex, just across the road from the government radio and television offices where a massive car bomb attack killed five people two years ago.

Heavily armed police in sandbagged bunkers guarded the mud-yellow brick-and-timber tourist centre, housing several historic two-storey buildings in the centre of Srinagar.

“Nobody is allowed to meet the passengers,” a security official guarding the building told reporters from behind a metal barricade tipped with sharp spikes.

The homes of at least some Srinagar families due to travel on the bus were locked and deserted on Monday.

A SIGN OF CHANGE: The bus, resuming for the first time since the first war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir in 1947, is seen as a key step in boosting a painfully slow and cautious peace process between between India and Pakistan.

Earlier, Kashmiris planning to travel to Muzaffarabad, had dismissed the rebel threat.

But many Kashmiris are scared.

“My father feels scared now. He is desperate to meet his brother across (the frontier), but cannot decide now after new militant threats,” said one anonymous Srinagar resident whose father is among the chosen 29.

The house of Fatima Bhat, due to travel to Muzaffarbad on Thursday to meet daughter Wazira Begum, was locked on Monday in central Srinagar. Her neighbours said she had gone into hiding after threats.

Pakistani tribesmen launched the first assault to take mainly Muslim Kashmir that same year. The Himalayan region, dubbed paradise on earth for its breathtaking landscapes, has been divided ever since and has been at the heart of half a century of tension between the nuclear-armed powers.

Indian authorities on Monday started issuing tickets for four buses being prepared for the journey. Each of them bears a logo with the words of a Kashmiri couplet: “I broke the sword and made sickles out of it”.

Security is being stepped up along the highway on the Indian side, which has thick pine-forested mountains on the left and an often precipitous fall-off to the grey waters of the Jhelum River on the right.

Violence involving militants and soldiers has increased in held Kashmir in the runup to the bus service.

Soldiers shot dead six militants in separate gunbattles at the weekend, while suspected guerrillas shot dead a senior activist of Kashmir’s ruling Peoples Democratic Party, police said.

India is erecting large billboards with the portraits of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, the first such honour for any Pakistani leader in held Kashmir.

“To shorten the distances and the to join the heart is the message from the messengers of friendship and peace,” reads one.—Reuters