Airliner Completes India-Pakistan Trip

An airliner has completed a roundtrip journey between India and Pakistan Thursday, the first commercial flight between the rival nations in two years and the latest sign of improving relations.

The Pakistan International Airlines flight from Lahore brought 42 passengers to the Indian capital, New Delhi, then returned to the Pakistani city with 114 passengers, including Indian and Pakistani businessmen, Indian filmmakers and journalists.

“Fantastic! It’s the beginning of a great year,” said Capt. T. Muzaffar, who piloted the PIA flight.

The flight is the result of improved relations between the two South Asian giants, who have been working to relieve tensions in recent months, raising hopes they will put decades of hatred and mistrust behind them. They severed air service and road and railway links amid tensions that led them to the brink of war. The last flights were on Jan. 1, 2002.

“This will increase people-to-people contact. It will also lead us to resuming our dialogue,” Syed Munawar Bhatti, deputy head at the Pakistani Embassy in New Delhi, said of the flight.

At New Delhi’s airport, the travelers from Lahore were handed red roses as they left the plane.

“We are very, very happy. We hope the communication channels are not shut again,” said passenger Jahangir Sharif, a Pakistani woman in her 50s.

Since April, the two countries have also restored bus services, resumed full diplomatic ties and observed a cease-fire between forces lined up on either side of the Himalayan region of Kashmir.

The area is split between the two countries, but both claim it in its entirety. More than 65,000 people, mostly civilians, have died in the conflict since 1989.

India wants the indefinite cease-fire in Kashmir and other volatile areas to be made “permanent,” Indian External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha said Thursday, quoted by Press Trust of India.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is hosting India’s prime minister and other South Asian leaders this weekend, and the first face-to-face meeting between the Musharraf and India’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee in two years will likely take place Saturday at a dinner opening the summit.

PIA chairman Ahmed Saeed, who saw off the flight from Lahore, said new air routes between the two countries would begin shortly, with possible future linkes to the Indian cities of Madras and Hyderabad.

From the Indian side, Indian Airlines has decided to fly from New Delhi to Lahore and from the Indian financial hub of Bombay to the Pakistani port city of Karachi.

Although Indian commercial flights are to start Jan. 9, a special Indian Airlines plane was to fly delegates and journalists on Friday for this week’s summit of South Asian nations in Islamabad.

Civil aviation officials from the two countries met in New Delhi in December and worked out the agreement for restarting air service, which along with the other travel links was snapped in the wake of a December 2001 terror attack on the Indian Parliament.

India blamed Islamic militants it says are backed by Pakistani intelligence agents for the attack. Pakistan denied the charge, but acknowledges giving moral and diplomatic support to the insurgents.

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Associated Press writer Asif Shahzad in Lahore contributed to this report.