Kathmandu, April 1:After holding talks for five days at a stretch, the Nepal-India joint secretary level teams could not thrash out the date for the Indian Airlines (YA) flight resumption as both the sides agreed to meet again.

The meeting was adjourned since some issues were left to be refined, according to Hari Bhakta Shrestha, Joint Secretary at the Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation, who headed the Nepali delegation taking part in the talks.

The place and the date of the next meeting between the two sides, however, have not been decided yet. “We will be meeting within few weeks,” said Shrestha.

“We will meet again very soon,” Indian Civil Aviation Secretary Sunil Arora told reporters after the talks here today.

Neither side elaborated what were the issues they had agreed on and what were the impending ones. “We have made progress on many aspects,” said Shrestha.

He, however, made it clear that the issue of deploying Indian security forces at the Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) did not surface during the talks. “The Indian team was satisfied with the present security arrangement at the TIA.”

The two sides, consisting of six members each, signed a document and exchanged it at the end of today’s talks.

The three-member Indian team arrived here last Monday — around three months after Indian Airlines suspended its inbound flights reacting to the hijacking of one of its flight that took off from the TIA on December 24 last year.  After being hijacked in the Indian aerospace some half an hour after it took off from Kathmandu, IC 814 hopped to several airports in the region reaching as far as the Middle East.

The Indian Airlines Airbus remained captured at the Kandahar Airport in Afghanistan for a week before the hijackers freed the hostages in exchange of three prisoners in India.

Immediately after the hijack, the Indian national flag carrier suspended its Kathmandu-bound flights citing security grounds while a high level investigation commission here concluded that there was no security lapse at the TIA on the day when the hijacking took place.

Until last year, after Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation, Indian Airlines topped the list of bringing in the biggest number of passengers — 30 per cent of the total inbound passengers arriving here by air. A little less than 500,000 tourists visited Nepal in 1999.