INTERVIEW - India says Pakistan still aiding Kashmir militants

Director General of Jammu and Kashmir Police, Kuldeep Khuda, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Srinagar July 18, 2009.

SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) - A two-decade-old Muslim insurgency may not end in Indian Kashmir unless Pakistan stops arming, training and sending militants to the disputed region, Kashmir's police chief said on Saturday.

"Infiltration from across (the border) is on, the training camps across for terrorists are still functional, and launching pads are on," Director General of Jammu and Kashmir Police Kuldeep Khuda told Reuters in an interview.

"The perpetrators of terrorist violence in India and particularly in Jammu and Kashmir are still openly propagating and supporting terrorism from Pakistan land. In this situation we should not expect that terrorism can be finished."

Pakistan, which like India claims all of the Himalayan region that is divided between them, has consistently denied its involvement in abetting an anti-India insurgency that has killed more than 47,000 people.

Although violence in the Kashmir valley has fallen significantly since India and Pakistan began a slow-moving peace process, militants and police are engaged in almost daily encounters in the roiled region.

India "paused" the dialogue after last November's Mumbai attacks, in which 166 people were killed in a three-day rampage by Islamist gunmen.

Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) has been blamed by India for the Mumbai attacks.

"They (militant groups) are operating in tandem and they are all being supported and financed by agencies across .... however LeT is a preferred group which is being sent for launching major actions here," Khuda said.

The police chief of Jammu and Kashmir state, India's only Muslim-majority state, agreed that human rights violations by security forces take place, and said all reports were investigated and the guilty punished.

"We will be able to bring down the terrorist violence further, I would definitely expect that people would realise that peace is the way forward not the violence," Khuda added.