ISLAMABAD Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif flew to Washington on Sunday for surprise talks with President Bill Clinton, raising speculation that new moves to solve the Indo-Pakistani crisis on Kashmir were imminent, Reuters said. "Prime Minister Sharif's spur-of-the moment dash to Washington is likely to be a turning point in the ongoing.... crisis, though it is not necessarily going to help it," the Nation newspaper said in a front page commentary.

The Pakistani leader's trip was not announced in advance and hours before he left by a commercial flight a foreign office spokesman said no date had been set for the encounter. A brief foreign ministry statement on Sunday said the meeting would take stock of "the deteriorating situation and the need for a settlement of the Kashmir dispute, which holds the key to durable peace and security in South Asia". Meanwhile, India said on Sunday it had captured the strategic Tiger Hill on its side of a military Line of Control in Kashmir after a fierce night-long battle.

"I am delighted to tell you that a battalion of the grenadiers recaptured Tiger Hill after a long and bloody battle," a senior defense official told Reuters on condition of anonymity, referring to the 4,590-metre (15,060-foot) peak that commanded a vital stretch of the Indian highway through northern Kashmir. "I am not a religious man, but I prayed very hard this morning," the Indian defense official said.

Military officials said troops launched their final assault on Tiger Hill on Saturday, with intense artillery exchanges between Indian and Pakistan gunners on both sides of the Line of Control (LOC) that slices through the Kashmir Valley. Tiger Hill looks down on India's National Highway 1-A, the main supply route for India's northernmost region of Ladakh as well as troops holding the Siachen Glacier north of the Drass and Kargil sectors where the fiercest fighting is now raging.

Meanwhile, a top Indian official said Sunday that India would never be the first to use nuclear weapons but was prepared to face a Pakistani nuclear strike over the current conflict in Kashmir, AFP reported. "We will not shed our doctrine that we will not be the first to use nuclear weapons," Brajesh Mishra, the prime minister's national security advisor, said in a television interview "But if some lunatic tries to do something against us, we are prepared for that eventuality." Mishra, who is also principal secretary to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, was responding to reported Pakistani threats to nuclearize the Kashmir conflict.

Last week, Pakistan's Religious Affairs Minister Raja Mohammad Zafarul Haq said his country would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if necessary to protect national security.