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Colombo: The Pakistan prime minister on Saturday promised to investigate accusations that his country's intelligence agency was involved in the July 7 bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul which killed 41 people, a top Indian diplomat said.
Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani also told his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, that he would discuss the matter with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday on the sidelines of a summit of eight South Asian leaders, India's Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon said.
Afghanistan has long accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency of backing the Taliban-led insurgency wracking the country.
The prime ministers of India and Pakistan met in the Sri Lankan capital yesterday to check the slide in their relations amid tensions over the Kabul attack and clashes between the armies of the two countries in the disputed Kashmir region.
The accusations that Pakistan helped a militant group bomb India's embassy in Afghanistan cast a cloud over the Saarc summit in Sri Lanka.
The main common feature of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) member states is deprivation - more than three quarters of the 1.5 billion population in the region earn less than two dollars (Dh7.34) a day.
The smallest member, the Maldives, has a population of 330,000, fewer than the number of babies born in a week in India, the biggest SAARC member. India has over 1.1 billion people and the population growth rate is 1.5 per cent. All eight states in SAARC enjoy a veto in the organisation where every decision must be taken through consensus.
Snail-like progress
That is partly blamed for the snail-like progress of the group, founded in 1985 with ambitious plans to follow in the footsteps of the European Union and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Almost all SAARC members except the Maldives have some sort of border issue or dispute with neighbours, and the cross-border conflicts have soured relations within the organisation and applied brakes on trade.
But most often, the summits have been held hostage to tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan which flared anew after last month's attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in which New Delhi suspects Pakistan's intelligence service.
The Indian Ocean atoll nation of the Maldives is listed as a "Least Developed State" together with four other SAARC members - Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. The second biggest member in SAARC is Pakistan with 155 million people, followed by Bangladesh with 141 million. It was Bangladesh which floated the idea of regional cooperation to enable SAARC's establishment.
The two Buddhist countries in the region are Sri Lanka and Bhutan. Nepal's population of 27 million is just below Afghanistan's 29.9 million.
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