“These soldiers were tortured and subjected to torture repeatedly,” he told a press conference in Delhi. “The condition of the bodies makes it clear that all injuries were ante-mortem, and deaths were caused by torture.
“This is not simply a breach of established norms, it is a civilisational crime against all humanity, a return to barbarous medievalism,” he went on “We demand the perpetrators be brought to justice I feel as if I have been personally violated. The dignity of every Indian soldier has been violated.”Mr Singh and his Pakistani counterpart, Sartaj Aziz, were to hold talks yesterday that could lower the temperature in Kashmir’s “near war”, which has cost several hundred lives in five weeks. But the clouds of more general war are gathering over India and Pakistan.The Indo-Pak relations have plummeted to a new low after the return of the tortured and mutilated bodies on Thursday. The six soldiers had been part of a patrol ambushed on or soon after 14 May. Some had eyes gouged out, others had genitals severed or skulls smashed. Old Indian soldiers said barbaric treatment of prisoners has long been traditional among the tribes in the north of Pakistan, where wives have been known to flay prisoners alive.Many of the guerrillas who infiltrated the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC), which is Kashmir’s de facto border, are believed to be ethnic Pathan tribesmen from Afghanistan.The macabre mutilations may have a simple explanation.

The handover of the remains, on the eve of the Pakistani Foreign Minister’s visit and a week after Indian pathologists say the men were killed, suggests someone in what Jaswant Singh calls “the Pakistani establishment” wants to torpedo the talks and goad India into escalating the conflict.Indians believe the fighting was a Pakistani army initiative. A respected analyst, Saeed Naqvi, wrote in the Indian Express yesterday that the Kargil operation might have been launched soon after the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers had talks about burying the hatchet, in New York, back in September.For peace to break out would always be a problem for Pakistan’s armed forces, which swallow 25 per cent of GDP. “That is when the army saw the writing on the wall,” Mr Naqvi writes. The timing of the body handover fuels the army conspiracy theory.The latest outbreak began on 5 May when India’s 121 Brigade sent a six- man patrol along the LoC at 18,000ft in the rugged, treeless Ladakh mountains, to check whether the snow had retreated enough for the summer positions to be re- occupied.But all six vanished.

When a second patrol went out to search, two died covering their comrades’ retreat and India discovered hundreds of guerrillas had established fortified positions deep inside the Indian border, on the peaks of the hills, with sophisticated equipment and supply lines back to Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.India started air strikes on 19 May to destroy these positions, and MiGs attack almost daily. The Indians say the guerrillas include Pakistan army regulars as well as mercenaries.Sartaj Aziz’s visit was proposed by Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, on the phone to the Indian Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee. Yesterday, Jaswant Singh said: “India is committed to the dialogue [with Pakistan] because we are the initiators of the dialogue … We continue to believe that in the ultimate, peace must prevail between these two lands.”Mr Singh’s demands for Mr Aziz are “re-establishment of the status quo ante”, and that “the perpetrators [of atrocities against Indian soldiers] be brought to justice”.He said Pakistan should pull back from “this ill-judged adventure”. But what if the Pakistanis don’t, a journalist asked? “Time will tell,” said Mr Singh.. PALESTINIAN SECURITY officers have distributed a leaflet denouncing Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, for corruption and collaborating with Israel, and warning he will share the same fate as Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian Communist dictator executed in 1989.

The leaflet, a sign that Palestinians as a whole may be turning against Mr Arafat and signed by an anonymous group calling itself Free Officers, accuses Mr Arafat of “giving authority to 3,000 thieves”.
They are able to travel freely outside the Palestinian enclaves in Gaza and the West Bank through a special agreement with Israel.The leaflet names senior lieutenants of Mr Arafat, saying they take bribes, get medical treatment abroad, are given free apartments and drive luxury cars, while ordinary Palestinian “soldiers do not receive their legal salaries”.The leaflet says labourers have to pay pounds 80 to pounds 160 each to Palestinian officials to get a work permit for Israel. The spread of the leaflet underlines the deep and growing rift between the Palestinian elite, who returned from exile with Mr Arafat in 1994, and the 2.5 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza.”Nobody would dare publish it in the papers, but it is being talked about in every home in the West Bank because they think its accusations are true,” said one Palestinian, who lives in Ramallah, a town north of Jerusalem. He wished to remain anonymous.Palestinians have often criticised men around Mr Arafat for corruption, but have usually seen the Palestinian leader as misled or misadvised.At the heart of discontent is a sense that Mr Arafat, and the small group of men he brought back from exile in Tunis, have done well out of the Oslo Accords negotiated with Israel in 1993.But nearly all Palestinians have seen their living standards plunge and their freedom of movement decrease over the past six years.The leaflet attacks by name almost all of Mr Arafat’s senior aides, particularly Musa Arafat, the head of military intelligence, and Khalid Salam, his business adviser. It also says: “The financial department headed by Fou’ad al-Shobaki includes a list of 80 names of people on the payroll, of whom only a few come to work.”The leaflet adds that friends of the elite and collaborators with Israel receive promotion in the security services, while those veterans long active in the Palestinian struggle are ignored.A further sign of Palestinian discontent with Mr Arafat’s leadership was the dismal turn-out for the so-called Palestinian “Day of Rage” on 3 June, called to protest against the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.Only 3,000 Palestinians demonstrated, compared with the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets during the Palestinian intifada (uprising) against Israel between 1987 and 1992. Palestinian observers said the small turnout was closely linked to popular disillusionment with Mr Arafat and his regime.Palestinian businessmen and foreign diplomats say corruption in the Gaza security forces has reached saturation point. Bribes are said to be required to carry out almost any business activity. One diplomat told The Independent: “Some businessmen won’t leave home without a bodyguard because they are frightened of being kidnapped by the security forces and held for ransom.”The leaders of the 11 security services established by Mr Arafat have made money since he returned to Gaza from, Tunis.But men from elements of the old Palestinian regular forces known as the Palestine Liberation Army are still poorly paid.

The authors of the leaflet are likely to come from their ranks.. THE TABLES were turned on China, which has had so much success in spying on the United States, when pictures of its secret crewed rocket capsule were published yesterday on the Internet. China is still waiting to show off its first astronaut – though it has been training people for the task since the 1970s.
The revelation will be an embarrassment to the Chinese authorities, who since 1995 have repeatedly announced plans to send a crew into space using their own rockets. So far, though, they have failed to do so – and the most recent claims are that it may not be until 2001 that China puts its own astronauts into space.The pictures were said to have been taken last year by a Mongolian construction company that helped to build the new launch facilities, at Jiuquan, south- east of Peking, in the Gansu region.China was offered the chance to send up astronauts with the US during the days of detente, and then with Russia on a paid-for basis to the space station Mir. But so far nobody has made the trip, despite the fact that in 1995 two Chinese men began training at a Russian cosmonaut centre with the intention of returning to China for a manned spaceshot.The interest of experts was heightened by the crew capsule at the top of the rocket, which appears to draw on the 35-year-old design for the Soyuz rocket developed by the Soviet Union in the days of the “space race”. The capsule includes an escape tower, which contains rockets that would fire to separate the capsule from the rocket if there was an emergency during countdown. Such a tower is not normally used in unmanned spacecraft.However, the need may be more acutely felt in China.