Iran FM to visit Pakistan, India amid tensions between two neighbors
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said the country’s top diplomat is scheduled to visit Pakistan and India amid soaring tensions between the two neighbors.
Baqaei said that the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi would leave for Pakistan on Monday to meet with the country’s high-ranking officials over the recent developments at the regional and international levels.
According to the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Araghchi will also pay an official visit to India this week.
The visits come amid heightened tensions between the two nuclear-armed countries over the April 22 terrorist attack in the Indian-administered Kashmir, which claimed the lives of 26 people. India has blamed Pakistan for the attack, but Pakistan has rejected the accusations. Since then, the two countries have taken several measures against each other.
On Saturday, New Delhi widened tit-for-tat measures against Islamabad, blocking access to the social media accounts of Pakistani actors and cricketers, as well as extending trade blocks and stopping postal services. Pakistan’s military said it carried out a “training launch” of a surface-to-surface missile weapons system on Saturday, further heightening tensions. On Saturday, India’s communications ministry issued a statement saying it had “decided to suspend the exchange of all categories of inbound mail and parcels from Pakistan through air and surface routes”.
The arch-rivals had already expelled each other’s citizens and closed the main border crossing, and barred aircraft from each other’s airspace.