India-Russia condemn terrorism in all forms, urge international community to intensify cooperation

New Delhi [India], December 7 : India and Russia strongly condemned terrorism in all its forms and manifestations and urged the international community to intensify cooperation against terrorism including safe havens, terror financing, arms, drugs trafficking and radicalisation.
This was stated in the India-Russia joint statement released by the Ministry of External Affairs following the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to India.
The two sides intend to focus particularly on increasing the effectiveness of countering terrorism, extremism, drug trafficking, cross-border organized crime, and information security threats, in particular by improving the functionality of the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure, the statement added.
To address the threat of chemical and biological terrorism, both sides emphasised the need to launch multilateral negotiations on an international convention for the suppression of acts of chemical and biological terrorism at the Conference on Disarmament, the statement read.
"With regard to the issue of Pakistan based terror groups, there was a strong convergence on the issue of counter-terrorism," Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla said during a press conference here on Monday.
"There was a sense by both sides that strong action needed to be taken by the international community to address the issue of terrorism, particularly cross border terrorism," he emphasised.
"Specific reference was made to the Lashkar-e-Taiba and other groups operating in our region," he said, emphasising, "I think you can understand from this that there was the fullest sense that responsible for terrorism in our neighbourhood need to be certainly taken into account by the international community."