ISAMAMABAD, Pakistan: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Monday decided to cancel his visit to the United States to participate in the two-day Nuclear Security Summit in Washington after a brutal terrorist attack rocked Lahore.
Sources said that now the special assistant to the prime minister on foreign affairs Tariq Fatemi will represent Pakistan in the summit.
The fourth Nuclear Security Summit is scheduled to be held in Washington on March 31 and April 01 to discuss the evolving threats and highlight steps to minimize the use of highly-enriched uranium.
On the sidelines of the summit, the prime minister was expected to hold separate talks with the US President Barack Obama and his Indian Counterpart Narendra Modi among other world leaders.
“Our participation in the Nuclear Security Summit process at the level of the Prime Minister manifests the importance attached to nuclear security by Pakistan and is a reflection of our confidence in our national nuclear security arrangements,” the Foreign Office Spokesman Muhammad Nafees Zakaria told media at his weekly press briefing in Islamabad on March 24.
The prime minister’s decision about cancelling his visit to the United States comes as a suicide blast took lives of at least 72 innocent people and left more than 300 injured in Lahore’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park on Sunday evening.
Sources said that the prime minister himself is supervising the investigation into the Lahore blast.
Earlier, Sharif also cancelled his planned visit to the United Kingdom after the Lahore blast and reached the Punjab Capital to preside over a security meeting in which he called for more proactive coordination amongst law enforcement and intelligence agencies to defeat the sordid designs of terrorists. He also urged the provinces to speed up intelligence-based operations against terrorists.
