| |
| |
![]() |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
ISLAMABAD : Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh will meet on the margins of a summit in Egypt next week, raising hopes peace talks could resume, officials said Thursday.
"The prime minister will be meeting, in addition to his Indian counterpart, several other heads of government and state," Pakistani foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Basit told reporters in the capital Islamabad.
Basit was speaking at a weekly press briefing in response to a question on whether Gilani would meet Singh at the summit for non-aligned countries in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh next week.
India's Singh met Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari in Russia on June 16 -- their first face-to-face meeting since Islamist gunmen killed 165 people during a devastating siege in India's financial capital Mumbai last year.
India blamed the November attacks on Pakistan-based militants linked to the country's powerful spy service and froze a four-year-old peace dialogue with its Muslim neighbour.
In New Delhi, a senior foreign ministry source confirmed the meeting.
"Since the two prime ministers will be at the same place and at the same time they will meet and we can only say the talks will be a continuation of what transpired in Russia," the source told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Pakistan's foreign ministry spokesman said the planned meeting would be preceded by talks between the foreign secretaries of the nuclear-armed rivals.
"Our two foreign secretaries will meet before the planned meeting between the two prime ministers," he said, giving no dates for any of the meetings.
"We are going with an open mind and hope that the composite dialogue is resumed," Basit added. "We are going to be meeting with a constructive and a positive mind."
Singh, whose re-election was welcomed in Pakistan, said in June he wanted to try again to make peace with Pakistan, but stressed Islamabad needed to take "strong and effective" action to end terrorism.
After meeting Zardari on the sidelines of a summit in Yekaterinburg, he said that if Pakistani leaders show "courage, determination and statesmanship to take the high road to peace, India will meet it more than half the way."
"I have spoken before also about my vision of a cooperative sub-continent and the vital interest people of the sub-continent have in peace. For this, we must try again to make peace with Pakistan," he said.
New Delhi says Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) planned and launched the Mumbai assault, in which 10 gunmen targeted multiple locations in Mumbai during a three-day killing spree.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since partition in 1947, two of them over the divided and disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.
- AFP/vm
|
