By Biswajyoti Das

GUWAHATI, India, July 21 (Reuters) - A powerful separatist rebel group which began talks on Friday with senior government officials to extend a 10-year-old ceasefire agreement deferred negotiations until end of this month, a senior rebel leader said.

A seven-member team of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Issac-Muivah) (NSCN-IM) and a group of Indian officials in New Delhi stopped discussions, without giving reasons.

"The next round of talks will be held in Nagaland on July 30," Tongmeth Wangnao Konyak, spokesman of the Naga rebels group, told Reuters.

He gave no reason for postponing the talks. The talks were earlier scheduled for two-days.

The Naga rebel leaders and Indian representatives were holding talks in Southeast Asian and European cities, besides New Delhi, over the past 10 years and for the first time talks between the two sides will be held in Nagaland.

On Friday both sides agreed to set up of a "consultative committee" to speed up the peace process, Konyak said.

The NSCN-IM agreed to a ceasefire in August 1997 and launched a peace process to bring an end to the country's longest-running insurgency, which has killed about 20,000 people since 1947.

But talks between the two sides have not made progress over the rebels' main demand of unification and eventual independence of Naga-dominated areas in northeast India, which is being opposed by other ethnic groups in the region.

Nagaland is a mainly Christian state of two million people on India's far eastern border with Myanmar.

Security analysts say peace with the Nagas is crucial to a broader peace in the northeast -- seven states connected to the rest of India by a thin strip of land and home to dozens of insurgent groups.

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