Paris: Senior Indian and Pakistani officials had a brief, frosty exchange in France on Sunday as the attacks in Mumbai two weeks ago overshadowed talks on Afghanistan. India claims Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba was responsible for the attack that killed 217 people and has sent Pakistan a list of 40 people it wants handed over.
Pakistan says it is still waiting for evidence from India on who was responsible. Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma, attending talks between Afghanistan's neighbours and major powers near Paris, did not have a separate meeting but exchanged a few words.
"Obviously, if you spend the day together, you are bound to speam to each other," Qureshi told a news conference with Sharma sitting beside him. "We did speak to each other and I can assure you it was in a very cordial atmosphere, in a very friendly tone." "We have to understand each other's concerns and address them, so it was a cordial exchange," he added, without elaborating on what they had said to each other.
Sharma gave a less positive account, telling Reuters after the news conference, "We were together in the same meeting. That's it."
The prospect of war between the nuclear-armed neighbours has faded but India says a four-year-old peace process is in jeopardy. The Mumbai attacks overshadowed the one-day talks in a wealthy Paris suburb, which were aimed at bolstering regional cooperation to improve security and development in Afghanistan.
The United States, Russia, China, Britain and Germany attended, as did the top UN envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, and the European Union's top foreign policy officials.
In a joint statement, the envoys said their talks, which followed a donors' conference in Paris in June, focused on fighting drug trafficking and terrorism as well as improving regional economic cooperation. Iran boycotted the talks in what was apparently its latest response to French President Nicolas Sarkozy's comment on Monday that he could not shake President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hand for saying Israel should be "wiped off the map".
France's ambassador in Tehran was summoned over the remarks last week. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki had been due to attend but pulled out at the last minute. "Too bad for him. We made do without him," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told reporters.
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