India‚ Pakistan hold peace talks

ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW DELHI: The top diplomats from India and Pakistan began peace talks today being held under the shadow of recent revelations implicating Pakistan’s intelligence agency in the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai.

Talks between Indian Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai and his Pakistani counterpart, Jalil Abbas Jilani, come a week after the arrest of a key suspect in the attacks on Mumbai.

The suspect told Indian investigators that officials from Pakistan’s intelligence agency were present in a control

room in the Pakistani city of Karachi while he and others directed attackers on the ground in Mumbai.

Last month, India and Pakistan held inconclusive talks on resolving long-standing disputes over a glacier in the Himalayas and a maritime boundary. This week’s two-day meeting is expected to prepare the agenda for talks between the countries’ foreign ministers. A date for that meeting has not been announced.

The latest talks focus on peace and security, including the threat posed by terrorism, the decades-old dispute over the Himalayan region of Kashmir and confidence-building measures to push closer ties, an Indian official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Jilani told reporters that he had been ‘mandated by the Pakistani leadership to move the peace process forward’.

Indian officials will press Islamabad over its failure to crack down on terror camps operated by Islamic militant groups and located in Pakistan.

India also is expected to hand over to Pakistani officials copies of a Pakistani passport and identity cards issued to the Mumbai terror suspect, Sayed Zabiuddin Ansari while he lived in Pakistan.

Ansari had used the Pakistani passport to travel to Saudi Arabia, where he was living before he was deported to India on June 21. India says that during his questioning by investigators last week, Ansari provided evidence of the kind of support given to the Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency during the 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which 10 Pakistani terrorists killed 166 people during a three-day siege.

For India, security is the top priority at the talks. New Delhi wants Islamabad to show it is serious in reining in the militants India blames for the Mumbai attacks.

Ties between the nuclear-armed rivals were fractured by the Mumbai attacks, but ties have improved gradually, with peace talks resuming in February 2011. The two sides have worked to thaw relations over the past two years by pushing bilateral trade and increasing people-to-people contacts.

During a visit to India in April, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari met with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and the two leaders pledged to improve relations.