Indian and Pakistani prime ministers to meet next week in Egypt

Jul 9, 2009, 13:32 GMT

   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.