Pakistan said it had test fired a medium-range, nuclear-capable ballistic missile on Wednesday, the second such test in less than a week.

Military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan said a Shaheen-I (Hatf-IV) missile was "successfully tested" in the morning.

"It can carry all kinds of warheads," he said.

A statement from the Pakistan military said the surface-to-surface missile had a range of up to 700 km (435 miles).

"The test is the part of the ongoing series of tests of Pakistan's indigenous missile systems," it said.

Neighboring countries had been given prior notification of the tests "in a spirit of confidence-building," the statement said.

Friday, Pakistan tested a short-range Hatf-III Ghaznavi missile that rival India dismissed as nothing special.

Pakistan and India engaged in what were seen as tit-for-tat missile tests last March, when Islamabad tested the short-range Abdali (Hatf-II) missile.

India test-fired the nuclear-capable Prithvi missile in April and then a short-range, surface-to-surface missile in June.

Pakistan's latest tests came as Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali was on a visit to the United States, where he is asking for US help to redress what Pakistan sees as a conventional arms imbalance in the subcontinent.

India and Pakistan conducted a series of nuclear tests in 1998 and last year.

Tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors have eased somewhat this year after they came close to a fourth war in 2002 over an insurgency in divided Kashmir. But there has been little progress toward peace talks partly because of renewed violence in the disputed Himalayan region.

(China Daily October 8, 2003)