What Osama? Gen backtracks, PM goes China shopping

‘‘This is misrepresentation of what the president said,’’ Musharraf’s spokesman Major General Rashid Qureshi said.

Musharraf has previously dismissed reports that the Al Qaeda leader may be hiding in Pakistan’s rugged tribal belt, but he acknowledged in an interview that it was a ‘‘possibility’’, the newspaper said.

‘‘If he is relegated to that position, where his group is forced or divided into small packets, now a small packet with him coming on our side and now hiding in one area, a house or a room, is a possibility,’’ it quoted Musharraf as saying.

Clarifying the remarks, Qureshi stressed that ‘‘the president said that he was quite sure that Laden was not in Pakistan and he said there is a rationale for that’’.

‘‘That rationale is that from the information that is available this man roams around with a large contingent of security and his bodyguards are in such a number that there is no possibility for him to be hiding in some small corner or a house in Pakistan.’’

Meanwhile, Pakistani Prime Minister Mirzafarullah Khan Jamali today accused ‘‘interest groups’’ within India of blocking resumption of India-Pakistan talks to resolve all pending problems, including the Kashmir issue.

‘‘There are interest groups who, for domestic reasons, whip up communal politics and maintain hostility towards Pakistan,’’ Jamali alleged here in a hard-hitting speech on his second day of his three-day maiden official visit to China. While describing such thinking as ‘‘dangerous,’’ Jamali told his Chinese audience that Pakistan is hopeful that India would ‘‘see path of reason and respond positively to our offer of dialogue.’’

‘‘In today’s world there is no alternative to dialogue,’’ he said while describing the Kashmir issue as the ‘‘prime source’’ of tension between the two South Asian nuclear powers.

‘‘A just settlement of this issue will lead to normalisation of relations between the two major countries of South Asia and will allow nearly one and half billion people of this region to use their energies for economic development,’’ he said.