PARIS, June 9: A contract with India for the sale of six submarines that was shortly to be announced had to be put on hold as long as India did not find a solution to its conflict with Pakistan in Kashmir, said an official of France’s Direction des Constructions Navales (DCN), 11 of whose employees were killed in the May 8 terrorist attack in Karachi.

As a result of the attack, said a French defence source, Paris might very well decide in the coming months to henceforth severely cut down on contracts that require, as in the case of the contract with the Pakistan Navy, an important transfer of technology to countries like Pakistan or India that are expected to be included on a list of “risk countries,” presently being compiled by the French foreign ministry.

The defence sources say the DCN should be ready very soon to announce the signing of a “major” — and more important — contract with India, for the sale of six submarines, but that French authorities are purposely holding up the signing of an accord as long as the present tension with Pakistan lasts. Then, too, France is known to be reviewing its defence sales policy with regard to South Asia, where it does not want apparently to give naval or air superiority to either Pakistan or India.

On the other hand, the DCN has announced the signing of an important contract with Malaysia for the sale of three submarines.

The contract — worth euros 1.035 billion ($1 billion) is the first to be signed by the DCN since the Karachi killings — and has been announced with much fanfare, for, said a DCN official, “We really need something like this to make us stop thinking about the past and start looking towards the future again.” Besides, said the official, the contract should provide five years of work for a shipyard that in recent years saw itself constantly forced to lay off employees.

The killing of the 11 naval employees and the wounding of another two dozen workers — all of whom were in charge of construction of an Agosta-90B submarine at Karachi naval shipyard — has left its mark on the DCN, and notably the Cherbourg shipyard where all of the employees were based. As the DCN official noted, “We here at Cherbourg are like one big happy family, except that, since May 8, we’re not all that happy anymore.”

As for the contact signed with Malaysia, it concerns the sale of three traditional propulsion-type submarines, two of them the Scorpene submarine which has become the DCN’s principal export in recent years, a submarine that was last sold to Chile, and which apparently will soon be making its way to several other unnamed countries where the DCN is negotiating export contracts.

The third submarine being sold to Kuala Lumpur is a second-hand Agosta-70, overhauled by the DCN for the Malaysian Navy to use it as a training vessel.

One reason that the sale of the submarines to Malaysia was given the green light by French authorities was that contrary to the 1994 accord with Pakistan for the sale of the three Agosta-90B submarines, the contract with Malaysia does not involve any transfer of technology, with all of the submarines being built and assembled in France.