ISLAMABAD, July 12: The Foreign Office on Wednesday hastened to clarify reported remarks of Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri on the Mumbai bomb blasts that evoked a caustic reaction from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) earlier in the day.
A statement issued by the Foreign Office spokesperson said the foreign minister had not drawn any link between the Mumbai bomb blasts and the Kashmir dispute in an interview with Reuters.
“At no stage during the interview did the foreign minister talk about a connection between the Mumbai terrorist attack and the Jammu and Kashmir dispute,” the Foreign Office spokesperson said, adding that the foreign minister’s remarks had been misreported.
“The foreign minister had emphatically and unequivocally condemned the terrorist attack in Mumbai yesterday,” the spokesperson said.
According to the spokesperson it was in another context while speaking about the Indo-Pakistan peace process that the foreign minister had stated that a number of confidence building measures were in place and the atmosphere between the two countries had improved. That the time, therefore, was right to address all outstanding issues, including the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, the spokesperson said.
Rejecting Indian allegations about the infrastructure of terrorism on Pakistani soil and in Azad Kashmir as baseless, the spokesperson asserted: “Pakistan does not tolerate terrorism and is in the forefront of international efforts to fight this menace.”
