INDIA: Unidentified gunmen yesterday shot dead the former home minister of western India's volatile Gujarat state.
Mr Haren Pandiya belonged to the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which was blamed for the pogrom of Muslims last year in which more than 1,000 died.
Police said his killing had sparked a security alert across the state.
Officials said the 43-year-old former minister was assassinated in his car, possibly by two men riding a motorcycle, while on his way home from an early morning walk in a park in central Ahmedabad, the state's commercial capital.
"He was hit by three bullets, two on the right side of his chest and one in the throat" Ahmedabad Police Commissioner K. R. Kaushik said.
Deputy Prime Minister Mr Lal Krishna Advani told reporters in New Delhi that Mr Pandiya lay slumped in his car for some time before he was discovered and taken to hospital where he died.
Mr Pandiya, who was state home minister for three years until 2001, is believed to have been closely involved in last year's sectarian rioting in central Ahmedabad.
Infighting in the BJP led to Mr Pandiya being sidelined by his rival and state chief minister Mr Narendra Modi during Gujarat's election that the party won on a hard-line Hindu nationalist campaign.
Meanwhile, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan conducted tit-for-tat missile tests amid rising regional tensions between the neighbours following the weekend massacre of 24 Hindus in northern Kashmir state, which is divided between the two but claimed by both.
India fired its surface-to-surface Prithvi missile, capable of carrying a one-tonne nuclear warhead, to a distance of 150 km off its eastern coast.
A few hours later Pakistan test- fired the nuclear-capable surface-to-surface Abdali missile, which has a range of 180 km.
Indian military officials insisted that the Pakistani missile launch was a tit-for-tat test-flight while Islamabad claimed its missile test had been planned in advance and not conducted as a reaction to its rivals'.
"We had given prior information to all our neighbours about the test," government spokesman Mr Aziz Ahmed Khan said in Islamabad.
The missile test by India came as a surprise as Pakistan was not notified about it in accordance with the memorandum of understanding signed by the two in 1991, he added.
India's defence spokesman, Mr P. Bandhopadhaya, said: "This was just a developmental trial and the test should not be linked to any situation or issue because it is an ongoing process."
Prithvi has been tested 16 times since its first trial in 1988 and was inducted into the army in the late 1990s.
Pakistan's Abdali was tested last May at a time when the two sides had mobilised more than one million troops along their common frontier and came close to war on at least two occasions.