Talking to Muhammad Mahdi Akhundzadeh, the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister here in the President House on Saturday, Asif Ali Zardari while condemning Mumbai attacks urged for enhancing cooperation to expose elements behind these unfortunate incidents instead of starting blame game.

According to sources, the meeting also discussed bilateral relations between Pakistan and Iran and the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) Gas Pipeline project.

The President during the meeting urged that the work on IPI should be started at the earliest, even without India, as Pakistan needs energy on urgent basis. He said that Pakistan would enhance its trade and economic cooperation with Iran.

The meeting also discussed overall situation of the region especially in context of prevailing situation in Afghanistan.

Muhammad Mahdi Akhundzadeh, the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister has expressed his gratitude over Pakistan’s support to Iran’s position on its (Iran) Atomic Programme and talked with the President to further enhance bilateral relations between the two brotherly countries.

Iranian Vice Foreign Minister during the meeting handed over a letter of Iranian President to President Asif Ali Zardari inviting him to visit Iran on behalf of President of Iran.

The Foreign Minister said the process of contacts with the country’s political leaders has already been initiated and the leaders of PML(N) and PML(Q) have been contacted in this respect.

To a question, Qureshi said this is not time for political point scoring and said the situation requires all the politicians to rise above the petty politics and show patriotism, nationalism and unity.

To another question, the Foreign Minister said, “the situation is serious. Let us not fool ourselves, it is a serious situation” as some people in India have termed this incident as their 9/11.

“We cannot be oblivious of the seriousness of the situation”, he remarked.

To a question as if the cabinet discussed the worst case scenario, the Foreign Minister said, “Obviously. We should hope for the best and plan for the worst.”

Replying to another query Qureshi said there was complete harmony between the Government of Pakistan and the country’s armed forces and the two are in contact with each other.

He said Pakistan is a peaceful and peace-loving nation adding, “but at the same time the government, the people and the armed forces of Pakistan are always prepared and fully determined to safeguard the country’s frontiers.”

They said that presently there is a wave of anger among Indians because the Mumbai attacks have put them in a state of shock.

Senior Journalist, political analyst Vinod Sharma said that, people in India are very angry but their anger is with their rulers and not with Pakistan.

The Indian people feel that their rulers move amid fool-proof security arrangements while the common citizens are left at the mercy of terrorists.

He said the people are also angry with the intelligence and security agencies.

He dispelled the impression of an anti-Pakistan sentiment among the people of India following Mumbai attacks. People do talk about the possibility of involvement of some rogue elements from Pakistan but they do not talk about Pakistan’s involvement in the incidents, he said.

He said that no one in India is ready to believe that state of Pakistan was involved in these incidents.

Analyst of Pak-India relations, senior Indian journalist Ojay Bhaskar was of the opinion that, amid rising tension following the Mumbai attacks, the people-to-people contact between Indians and Pakistanis are very robust and there exists lot of empathy among them for each other.

He said that when the Mumbai operation was underway, the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan were in telephonic contact which establishes the fact that there is a mutual quest for interaction and cooperation on all issues.

Presently the atmosphere in India is very tense but hopefully the situation would get normal very soon , he said.

He said that it is a test period for the fate of peace process between India and Pakistan because the organizers of terrorist attacks wanted to derail it.

A senior Pakistani official said the move came at the request of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who called Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari on Friday and told him the attackers may have come from Karachi, a port on Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast.

India’s allegations of a Pakistani link to the attacks on Mumbai raised fears that the already strained peace process between the two nuclear-armed neighbors could collapse, and dispatching Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha is seen as an attempt by Islamabad to quickly ease tensions with New Delhi.

“The decision to send the highest ranking spy master will deflect unofficial Indian criticism that some elements from Pakistan carried out the attack,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a former Punjab University professor and a leading Pakistani political commentator. “This is an unusual step and we have to wait and see what kind of interaction takes place in Delhi.”

For Indians and Pakistanis alike, the ISI is no ordinary intelligence agency, and Mr. Singh’s request caught many in India by surprise. Only five months ago his government accused the ISI of helping plot a car bombing that destroyed India’s embassy in Afghanistan and killed 60 people.

In its own country, the ISI has long been seen as a political power broker, helping take down civilian governments and bolster military regimes. It also cultivated the Taliban and a host of other Islamic militant outfits — including, at times, al Qaeda — that turned on Pakistan after Islamabad sided with the U.S. following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

But many in Pakistan and abroad believe that at least some elements of the ISI maintain contacts with the militants in defiance of the country’s political leadership.

Dispatching Lt. Gen. Pasha to India could signal a new relationship between the ISI and Pakistan’s young civilian government, which has sought to reign in the agency. It failed earlier this year to remove the ISI from military control, but it did in the last week abolish the agency’s political wing, saying the ISI’s sole focus should be counterterrorism.

Reputed to be a tough soldier, Lt. Gen. Pasha supervised Pakistan military’s campaign against militants before being picked to run the ISI earlier this year. It is not clear how soon he will travel to India but arrangements are being made for a trip, said the senior official.

What kind of reception he will get in India is an open question. New Delhi has long accused the ISI of supporting the Islamic militants who have plagued India for nearly two decades, especially those fighting Indian forces in Kashmir, the predominately Muslim Himalayan region at the center of the rivalry between India and Pakistan. Islamabad has long denied the accusations.

“I can’t tell you the details since the investigation is going on,” he said. “Until the investigation is complete, it will be difficult to say where they came from and how they came.”

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also indicated that the gunmen came from Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, in a telephone call with his Pakistani counterpart Friday.
Karachi police have said they have no evidence the attackers departed from their city.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani condemned the “heinous crime” and said he would send the chief of his country’s intelligence agency to help with the investigation.
A group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedeen has claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s coordinated and deadly attacks in southern Mumbai, but security analysts know next to nothing about the group, and some discount its claim.

Intelligence officials from India and beyond are trying to determine who the attackers were and what their motivation was. The attacks left at least 155 people dead and more than 300 injured at a nine sites across Mumbai.
“Deccan Mujahedeen seem to be this amazing group that has come out of nowhere, that has been operating under the radar for all this time, yet able to mount such a sophisticated and well-coordinated attack,” security analyst Will Geddes said.
One highly placed intelligence official who has been briefed on the attacks said that the head of the operation is a Bangladeshi and that the militants are Indians, Kashmiris and Bangladeshis. The Indian military has sustained a large number of casualties, the source said.

A U.S. counterterrorism official said the level of sophistication in the attack leads officials to believe that it might be tied to Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (Army of the Pure), an Islamic extremist group that has carried out previous attacks in India.