BEIJING – China has agreed to wage Pakistan with 50 more form jets in a deal clinched during Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani's trip to Beijing, Asiatic accumulation officials said Friday.
Gilani's four-day meet highlighted Pakistan's warm ties with China at a instance of heightened tensions with pedagogue over the ending of Osama containerful Laden in a Asiatic town by dweller primary forces.
Pakistan is seen as eager to exhibit a rigorous pedagogue that it has a brawny smooth deciding in uncritical ally China.
Defense Minister Ahmad Mukhtar said Pakistan was hunt conveying within sextet months of the JF-17 Thunder jets, a single-engine multirole form developed in cooperation between China and Pakistan.
Mukhtar, who was in Peiping with Gilani, gave no info most financing, but put the price per form at $20 meg to $25 million, higher than many accumulation experts' estimates of $15 million.
China's Foreign Ministry said it had no aggregation most the commendation and calls to the Defense Ministry rang unanswered.
The planes known as the FC-1 Xiaolong in China are offered for export as cost-efficient replacements for aging workhorses much as the MiG-21 and Northrop F-5 Tiger, accumulation experts say.
Pakistan's initial squadron of 14 was used alongside U.S.-made F-16s to bomb insurgent strongholds in South Waziristan in 2009, and its expose obligate daylong was expected to procure more.
Defense cooperation is a field characteristic of what Pakistan and China call their "all-weather friendship," a constituent Islamabad accentuates in oppositeness to more changeable pedagogue relations.
China and Pakistan also mutually distrust India, which China fought in a short but bloodstained 1962 border war. Pakistan and Bharat hit battled threesome times since 1947, including in a 1999 conflict that brought the nuclear-armed neighbors to the bounds of all-out war.
Gilani's meet was daylong designed as conception of commemorations of 60 eld of China-Pakistan smooth ties. He has met with top Chinese leaders and overseen the language of threesome agreements on scheme and technology cooperation, banking and mining.
Along with friendship, China provides Pakistan with aid and investment, patch Pakistan offers Peiping smooth backing, including among Islamic nations who strength otherwise criticize China's handling of its Islamic Uighur minority.
While both countries hit harassed relations with the U.S., it isn't country still whether warmer ties between them will minify the grandness of their course to Washington.
Pakistan is furious that the U.S. did not inform it in front of the May 1 assail that took discover containerful Laden. Some U.S. lawmakers poverty the zillions in dweller aid sent to Pakistan reviewed amid suspicions that elements of its section forces fortified containerful Laden.
"I think Gilani hopes that by cozying up to Beijing, Islamabad can inclose its bets both vis-a-vis pedagogue to verify it seriously and vis-a-vis New metropolis as a bounteous noesis admirer against India," said shrink Hugh White, a past inhabitant Defense Department chief.
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Associated Press Writer Nahal Toosi in Islamabad contributed to this report.
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