ISLAMABAD - Islamabad and New Delhi are in contact to set a new date for Secretary level talks which were mutually postponed following the armed attack on India’s western Pathankot airbase on January 2 leaving eight people dead. Pakistan is also investigating into the ‘leads’ shared by India and taken into custody nearly two dozen of suspects including Maulana Masood Azhar chief of his proscribed Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM).
“Pakistan and India are maintaining high level contacts and investigation is continuing on the basis of information provided by India”, a senior Pakistani diplomat told The Nation on Tuesday.
Defence Minister Khawaja Asif yesterday told reporters that Maulana Masood Azhar was not taken into custody without any lead or reason. “There must have been some intelligence which led to the banned JeM’s chief's taken into custody”, he said. He said Pakistan cannot afford that the non-State actors roam around openly and put the security of the country in jeopardy. Khawaja Asif said both Pakistan and India share the intention to resolve issues. He hoped that the bottlenecks will eventually be removed and the bilateral relations will improve.
He said exchange of information is underway between the two sides over the armed attack on India's Pathankot airbase on January 2. Pakistan and India last month agreed to resume talks to resolve issues.
with the new title of ‘Comprehensive Dialogue Process’.
The first meeting of their Foreign Secretaries was scheduled for January 15 to charter an initial six month agenda of the talks but mutually postponed the talks slated for Jaunary 15 ostensibly because of investigation into the Pathankot air base attack.
Despite that India has recently shown warm gesture to engage Pakistan, some political observers and analysts still doubt the sincerity of New Delhi in peace talks. They believed the Pathankot incident was yet another false flag like others it had orchestrated in the past to malign Pakistan as a terrorism sponsoring State.