KUALA LUMPUR, June 21: Malaysia’s prime minister spoke on Friday of a botched attempt to engage him in telephone diplomacy with President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to ease tension over Kashmir.

Mahathir Mohamad said he chatted away with the Indian premier on Thursday thinking that the Indian leader wanted to speak to him.

“He was thinking I was calling him. I was thinking he was calling me,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of his political party.

“The same thing happened to President Pervez Musharraf also. What they (somebody) did was to tell President Musharraf that I want to speak to him,” said the 76-year-old Mahathir, who is Asia’s longest serving statesman.

He did not identify the party that had tried to engage him in the rounds of telephone diplomacy.

The Indian foreign ministry issued a statement on Thursday following what it said was a “10-minute conversation” between Mahathir and Vajpayee.

“The prime minister emphasized that the problem between India and Pakistan are bilateral problem and that needs to be sorted out bilaterally by the two countries,” it said.—Reuters