Islamabad - Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani
will meet his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of a
summit next week in Egypt, with the hope of resuming peace talks
between the two countries, a Pakistani official said on Thursday.
'The prime minister will be meeting, in addition to his Indian
counterpart, several other heads of government and state,' foreign
ministry spokesman Abdul Basit told reporters in Islamabad.
The summit will be held in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm
el-Sheikh from July 15-16.
'We are going with an open mind and hope that the composite
dialogue is resumed. We are going to be meeting with a constructive
and a positive mind,' Basit said.
India halted a five-year-old bilateral peace dialogue after the
November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai that it blames on the
Pakistan-based Islamic militant organization Lashkar-e-Taiba.
More than 170 people were killed in the attack on hotels, a cafe,
hospital and Jewish centre by 10 gunmen who investigators say
travelled to India by sea from Pakistan.
The ice was broken between the two countries in their tense
relations on June 16 when Singh met Pakistan President Asif Ali
Zardari on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
summit in the Russian town of Yekaterinburg .
'I am happy to meet you, but my mandate is to tell you that the
territory of Pakistan must not be used for terrorism,' Singh told
Zardari as soon as they met.
Pakistan's Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Thursday that the
foreign secretaries of the two countries would meet before the
planned Gilani-Singh meeting in Egypt.
New Delhi is reportedly under pressure from the United States to
resume peace talks with Islamabad that aim at resolving all
contentious issues, including the Himalayan region of Kashmir.
Washington wants a normalization of the relations between the
South Asian neighbours so that Pakistan can focus on its fight
against the Taliban on its border with Afghanistan.
Pakistan and India have fought three wars since their independence
from Britain in 1947, two of them over Kashmir.
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