Open to Pakistan visit but suitable outcomes needed: PM

New Delhi - Amid disclosures by 26/11 plotter Abu Jundal linking Pakistani state actors to the Mumbai carnage, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said he was looking forward to visiting the neighbouring country but stressed that there have to be "suitable outcomes" for such a trip.

"I am looking forward to visiting Pakistan. No dates have been finalised for the visit," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a leading Indian daily in an interview Friday.

"As you know, there have to be suitable outcomes for such a visit," he said in an interview published in the Hindustan Times Friday.

The interview was published a day after the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan held talks here, during which the revelations made by Abu Hamza Jundal, a Lashkar-e-Taiba operative linking Pakistani state actors to the Nov 26, 2008, Mumbai terror spree, figured prominently in the discussions.

While India pressed Pakistan to act on information relating to Jundal's disclosures and bring the perpetrators of 26/11 to justice, Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Jalil Abbas Jilani rejected any insinuation of involvement of Pakistani state agencies in the Mumbai terror attack.

Manmohan Singh had accepted Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari's invitation to him to visit Islamabad during the latter's daylong visit to New Delhi April 8, but had indicated that only concrete deliverables on important issues will make such a visit possible.

Given the continuing differences between the two sides on Sir Creek and Siachen, what Islamabad calls the doable issues, not many are expecting any breakthrough that could form the basis for the prime minister's visit to Pakistan.

The gap between the two sides on the contentious issue of terror was evident at the July 4-5 talks, indicating there was no substantive movement in the dialogue process which the two countries revived in February last year after a long hiatus following the Mumbai attacks.