Pakistan and Indian leaders in Kazakhstan for security meet

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has landed in Kazakhstan for a security conference which will also be attended by Pakistan's military ruler General Pervez Musharraf.

His aircraft landed in the Kazakh commercial capital, Almaty, just after midnight. Musharraf arrived in Dushanbe, the capital of nearby Tajikistan, another former Soviet Central Asian state, some seven hours earlier.

India and Pakistan, both nuclear armed, have around a million troops facing each other across their border, and are likely to come under pressure at the 16-nation Conference on Interaction and Confidence-building Measures in Asia (CICA) to defuse the tension between them.

But Vajpayee told reporters at New Delhi airport before his departure that he did not expect to have a one-to-one meeting with Musharraf, saying "there is no such plan".

Musharraf will arrive in Almaty on Monday evening after a series of talks with Tajik President Imomali Rakhmonov.

While a meeting in Almaty between Musharraf and Vajpayee has been all but ruled out, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who also arrives in Almaty overnight tonight, is expected to hold bilateral talks with both of them.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov said last week that Putin would try to persuade them "to put confrontation in the past."

CICA was first proposed by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in 1992, but this is its first full meeting.

It groups 16 nations, including Russia, China, Afghanistan, Israel, Iran, Turkey and the Palestinians. A further 10 nations, including the United States, Australia and Japan have observer status.

Chinese President Jiang Zemin is also due to arrive in Almaty tomorrow morning, before the plenary session of CICA. It was not yet clear who would attend from most of the countries involved.

The Kazakh foreign ministry says merely that there will be "bilateral and multilateral meetings according to a separate programme", without giving any details.

- REUTERS