The United Nations is to evacuate dependants of its staff in Pakistan and India because of the tensions between the two nuclear-armed rivals.
"A decision has been taken in New York (UN headquarters) to evacuate dependants in Pakistan because of the current tensions", the source in Islamabad said.
A UN spokesman said the action shouldn't be seen as an "evacuation'" and that the UN was merely falling in line with programmes the United States, Britain and other Western countries began implementing yesterday.
The Department of Foreign Affairs yesterday advised Irish citizens to leave Pakistan and to reconsider travelling to India as fears of war increased
Clashes continued today when two Kashmiri boys were killed in militant attacks in Indian-controlled Kashmir. India's defence minister said he did not see an immediate resolution to the tense border standoff with Pakistan.
Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes said the situation was "stable," but he appeared today to back away from that stance.
"There is still no coming closer in sight," he said in Singapore, on the sidelines of an Asian defence summit.
In Srinagar, the summer capital of India's Jammu-Kashmir state, a 14-year-old boy, Bilal Ahmad Dagga, was killed and 14 civilians injured in a grenade explosion.
The grenade, which also injured two Indian soldiers, was lobbed into the street by suspected Islamic militants, the state police control room said.
In Nihalpora, some 22 miles north of Srinagar, one unidentified guerrilla was killed in a gun battle with Indian paramilitary forces, according to Border Security Force officials.
A teenaged boy died in the cross-fire and two soldiers were wounded. India has accused Pakistan of supporting Islamic militant groups which have waged a 12-year insurgency in the Indian-ruled portion of Kashmir, demanding the independence or merger with Pakistan of India's only Muslim-majority state.
Pakistan says its support for the insurgents is only moral and diplomatic and that it does not support terrorist attacks of any kind. At least 60,000 people have died in Kashmir since 1989.
India and Pakistan have gone to war twice over the divided Himalayan province, which both countries claim in its entirety. With no sign that either India or Pakistan was offering a diplomatic solution in Kashmir, concern mounted about a broader military conflict.
Both India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998, raising the stakes in their long-standing rivalry. Meanwhile, Pakistan continued to move troops away from the Afghan border, where they are helping US forces in their campaign to flush out al-Qaeda and Taliban militants. Islamabad is considering re-deploying the soldiers to the Indian frontier. AFP