KATHMANDU, Sept 13 (Reuters) - Pakistan’s foreign minister said on Saturday he planned to visit India next month to invite Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to a regional summit meeting in January.

Ties between the nuclear-armed rivals, which nearly went to war for a fourth time last year, have improved slightly in recent months but India has linked fresh talks to an end to attacks by Islamic rebels fighting Indian rule in disputed Kashmir.

But there was no sign of any let-up in violence in the Muslim-majority Himalayan region where four Indian soldiers, 11 rebels, a pro-India politician and two civilians were killed, police said.

"I plan to go to the other three countries, and that would be some time in October," Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri told reporters in the Nepali capital, Kathmandu.

The Pakistani foreign minister was referring to India, Bhutan and the Maldives, which together with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, make up the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).

Kasuri is on a tour of south Asian countries to invite leaders to a group summit in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

The 12th SAARC summit was originally planned for last January but was postponed after India declined to go because of tension with Pakistan. Kasuri said he expected the Indian leader to attend the rescheduled meeting.

"This time the indications are that the Indians will attend," Kasuri said.

REBELS RAID CAMP

But hours before Kasuri spoke in Kathmandu, four Indian soldiers including an officer were killed and six wounded when suspected Muslim rebels stormed an army camp in Indian Kashmir.

Police said one militant was also killed.

More than a dozen separatist rebel groups have been battling security forces in Indian Kashmir since 1989.

India accuses Muslim Pakistan of supporting the rebels. Pakistan says it only offers political and diplomatic support to what it calls a Kashmiri freedom struggle.

After teetering on the brink of war last year the neighbours have taken tentative steps to improve ties in recent months following a call for talks in April by Vajpayee.

They have recently restored full diplomatic links and resumed a cross-border bus service that was suspended in the wake of a bloody December 2001 raid on the Indian parliament that India blamed on Pakistan-based militants.

But after 52 people were killed in car bombings in Bombay on August 25, and a surge of violence in Kashmir, Vajpayee ruled out talks with Pakistan unless there was an end to attacks.

Apart from the attack on the Indian army camp, in Kashmir’s Bungush area near the border with Pakistan, police said Indian soldiers killed 10 militants in separate clashes across the region, including four rebels who were trying to slip into Indian territory from Pakistani Kashmir. Two civilians were killed in a bomb attack believed aimed at Indian troops.

A former rebel who switched sides and became a prominent pro-India politician was killed along with two associates in a separate rebel attack, police said.

Kasuri proposed South Asian monitors along a 740 km (642-mile) ceasefire line, known as the Line of Control, that separates the rivals in the disputed region.

"Let us have international monitoring," he said. "Let us have military observers from all SAARC countries on both sides of the Line of Control." (Additional reporting by Sheikh Mushtaq in SRINAGAR)