Tension prevailed Wednesday on the Bangladesh-India border after both sides agreed to maintain frontier peace and the US called for a quick resolution of the dispute which led to fatal skirmishes last week.
The Daily Star newspaper said tension remained high at several points in the 4,000-kilometer (2,500-mile) border following a reported build-up of Indian Border Security Forces (BSF).
The Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) border guards were on "high alert" but have been asked to refrain from opening fire unless provoked by the other side, the Star said, quoting unidentified sources.
A Bangladesh foreign ministry spokesman Wednesday rejected Indian press reports of BDR build-up along India's Assam, Tripura and Mizoram frontier.
"There has been no BDR buildup ... No Bangladesh army has been deployed in any of the sectors as stated in those reports," he said.
"The border situation is generally calm and peaceful," he added.
BDR chief Major General Fazlur Rahman and his Indian counterpart Gurbachan Jagat had agreed during a telephone conversation to take necessary steps in maintaining "peace and harmony" on their common border, the spokesman said.
Officials said talks and meetings at other levels of the border guards had eased tension sparked by the April 18 border skirmish which left 19 soldiers dead, 16 of them Indian.
Tourism between the two countries remained unaffected, while land border trade, halted after the clash, has resumed, officials said.
Henry Stackpole, a retired United States marine lieutenant general heading the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, told reporters Wednesday in Dhaka that "border skirmishes were a fact of life, but what is important is keeping in control and in constant touch" with the bordering country.
"It just happens and no one desires it," he said.
He praised Bangladesh and India for showing "great restrain (which) did not allow the situation to blow-up."
Stackpole, who headed a US marine rescue mission when Bangladesh was struck by one of the worst cyclones in 1991 killing 130,000 people, said at the end of a three-day visit that border disputes between these two countries were possible because of the "artificial aspects of the border line with some 300 disputed territories."
"Some homes have a living room on this side and the bedroom on the other giving scope for miscalculation," he said, referring to the British partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947.
The US Tuesday said it hoped for a quick resolution to the dispute between the usually friendly neighbors.
State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said Washington was pleased some tension had been defused after Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed and her Indian counterpart Atal Behari Vajpayee spoke by telephone over the weekend.
But Reeker said the US would like to see New Delhi and Dhaka take further steps.
During talks with Vajpayee, Premier Sheikh Hasina expressed her shock and grief at the loss of lives on both sides, but insisted the Bangladeshi border guards had opened fire in "self-defense."
According to the BDR, 415 civilians and 10 BDR personnel were killed by the BSF in the past 25 years.
The Bangladeshi press Wednesday maintained the skirmish was the result of a BSF intrusion, prominently displaying the pictures of the three BDR men "martyred" in the incident.
India has blamed the clashes on "criminal adventurism" by the BDR, saying its units had operated independently of the Bangladesh government.
Witnesses said the rightwing opposition Jatiya Ganatantrik party here Wednesday torched an effigy of Vajpayee, but there was no violence -- DHAKA (AFP)
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