ISLAMABAD, Feb 7: Pakistan said on Thursday it has been closely watching massive acquisition by India of all sorts of arms and equipment which can be used only for offensive, and assured that Islamabad has taken actions needed to safeguard its security.

Chief defence spokesman Maj-Gen Rashid Qureshi and his foreign office colleague Aziz Ahmad Khan said this at their press briefing when asked about the recent visit to New Delhi by the Russian defence minister during which the two sides had reached arms deals worth billions of dollars and agreed to increase military cooperation which would significantly enhance Indian military offensive capabilities on land, air and sea.

Gen Qureshi said that Pakistan was aware of large allocations to Indian military budget over a period of time, which, he hoped, had also been noted by the world powers concerned with international security requirements. India at times, he pointed out, had increased its military budget as much as the total defence budget of Pakistan.

He assured that Pakistan would continue to monitor the situation across the border and take whatever actions were needed to safeguard its security.

He reiterated Pakistan's suggestion that India should accept monitoring of both sides of the Line of Control by a reinforced UN military observers group so that it could report to the United Nations the correct position on Indian allegations that Pakistan had been arranging cross-border infiltration as also whether Indians were forcibly pushing people, including children, into Pakistan.

Invited to comment on a recent statement by Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at an election rally that President Pervez Musharraf could never get Kashmir from India, no matter how many Kashmir (solidarity) days he celebrated, and that "this is decidedly a settled issue." Pakistan, the FO spokesman said, did not seek any piece of land, nor any other such thing from India. Pakistan, he stressed, had all along been insisting that India should honour its own commitments made long ago to the people of Jammu and Kashmir and enshrined in the United Nations Security Council resolutions which the Indian leadership had accepted.

He said what Pakistan had been demanding was that India should resolve the dispute outstanding for more than 50 years in accordance with the UN resolutions which also defined a machinery for their implementation, or agree to the peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute according to the wishes and will of its people through bilateral means or by inducting a third-party mediation.

In reply to the claim that no Indian armed forces were used in Jammu and Kashmir in 1948 when they had occupied a large part of the Indian state whose accession to either India or Pakistan was still pending, Gen Qureshi said the Indian assertion was false. It was a matter of record that an Indian brigade with artillery had been airlifted to Srinagar and it was only then that Pakistan forces were obliged to join the fray in order to assist the Kashmiris who had come under Indian military oppression.

Gen Qureshi agreed that he had recently visited a US naval carrier but denied it was for meeting some Al Qaeda prisoners.

The FO spokesmen, responding to a question, said that Pakistan had taken all legal means to prevent so-called human trafficking which unfortunately was a worldwide phenomenon. He said he had no knowledge of any American statement threatening imposition of sanctions if Pakistan did not take steps to prevent human trafficking.