International
Pakistan will not accept pre-conditions, says Sattar
By Vaiju Naravane
PARIS, FEB. 5. The Pakistan Foreign Minister, Abdul Sattar today ruled out the extradition of alleged terrorists from Pakistan to India and said his country would not accept pre-conditions for a dialogue.
``Should conditions come before the dialogue or should the dialogue address the conditions? It's a vicious circle. Preconditions pre-empt a dialogue, it makes progress very difficult,'' Mr. Sattar told journalists during a short halt in Paris on his return from a Ministerial meeting on global security in Munich.
He will be meeting the French Foreign Minister, Hubert Vedrine, later today.
Mr. Sattar accused India of wishing to ``settle old scores'' by providing a list of 20 alleged terrorists.
``These persons include cases that go as far back as 1981. India has found in the present environment an opportunity for settling old scores. This is not related to December 13. In the context of the present, to establish conditions to issues going as far back as 20 years does not seem to us to be a salutary move,'' he said.
He also suggested that New Delhi might be behind terrorist attacks in Pakistan.
``There have been many acts of terrorism in Pakistan. What are the origin? You can read Pakistani newspapers and you will see lots of references to India,'' Mr. Sattar said.
Asked whether Pakistan's ban on the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba which New Delhi had long accused of carrying out terrorist activities in Jammu and Kashmir meant that Islamabad was now recognising that its territory had been used for cross-border terrorism, the moot point around which the Agra summit failed, Mr. Sattar evaded the issue saying, ``We have proposed that both sides should jointly make an announcement that neither will permit the use of its territory by criminals who plan terrorist attacks against the other. It has to be a reciprocal agreement.''
He confirmed that his Government had not been able to make much headway in finding the kidnappers of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal's Bombay Correspondent.
``A bill of a mobile telephone in Pakistan has been found. From this bill, it appears that the telephone was used for calls to New Delhi. That is about as much as we know. We should not read an accusation into it; it's a fact. The telephone numbers are known not only to us but to the U.S. embassy which has been cooperating in the investigation. To whom and for what purpose these calls were made would be total speculation. These are leads that are being used by the investigators.''
Mr. Sattar rejected suppositions that Pakistan had been sidelined in the new set-up in Afghanistan. The military relationship between India and Israel was a cause for concern.
``Today after Russia, Israel is India's second-largest military supplier with purchases totalling between $two and three billion,'' he said adding that there was, for the moment, no indication of a nuclear military exchange between India and Israel.
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