Islamabad, Dec 1 (IANS) Government officials of Pakistan’s northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province Thursday turned down an invitation to visit the NATO headquarters in Brussels in protest against the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a NATO air strike.
Sources told the Online news agency that NATO had invited two provincial ministers, two secretaries and a few provincial assembly members to visit the alliance headquarters in Brussels in the second week of December.
The decision by the provincial government came after the federal government refused to participate in a conference on Afghanistan to be held in Bonn.
The decision would be forwarded to the NATO headquarters in a formal statement, the report said.
Maj. Gen. Ishfaq Nadeem, director general of military operations, has termed the air strikes as an ‘unprovoked act of blatant aggression’ because the NATO had been informed that it was an army check-post that was being attacked, the Associated Press of Pakistan reported.
Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said NATO forces will no longer be allowed to spill even a single drop of blood of Pakistani citizens and soldiers.
‘Enough is enough. The government will not tolerate any incident of spilling of even a single drop of blood of any civilian or soldier,’ Khar told the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs.
