After a gap of more than six years, top defense officials from India and Pakistan resumed talks Thursday on a lingering dispute over the world's highest battleground, the Siachen Glacier, which cuts through the Himalayas in Kashmir. Despite a thaw in relations in recent months, both nations maintain forces on the frigid mountainsides, located 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) above sea level, but there has been no fighting since the two neighbors reached a cease-fire accord in November last year. Meanwhile, violence rocked the Indian portion of Kashmir with a lone militant storming a building housing paramilitary soldiers in an apparent suicide attack, killing nine soldiers and wounding 10 before being shot dead after a 12-hour gunbattle, an officer said Thursday. The militant hurled a grenade into the building in a residential neighborhood in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu-Kashmir state, and then entered and fired repeatedly in the overnight attack, said V.D. Tokas, deputy inspector-general of the Central Reserve Police Force. India and Pakistan have wrangled over Siachen since 1984, when the Indian army first sent a force to occupy part of the glacier, although there has been no fighting in the region since the two countries signed a cease-fire in November last year. The defense secretaries of the two countries last discussed the disputed region in 1998.
