The failure of Pakistan's Senate deputy chairman, a prominent Islamist politician, to get a U.S. visa on time for a trip to the United States prompted Pakistan to boycott a U.N.-sponsored meeting on Monday, a parliamentary official said, Reuters reports.
It was not clear whether the failure of Senator Abdul Ghafoor Haideri to get a visa on time for his trip was related to U.S. President Donald Trump's call for "extreme vetting" of applicants amid a push to suspend visas from seven other countries.
Haideri, a leader of the Islamist Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) party, had been scheduled to lead a delegation to a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union on Monday and Tuesday at U.N. headquarters in New York.
However, when he did not get a U.S. visa on time to travel by the weekend, he canceled his trip and the rest of delegation decided to boycott, Chaudhry Arshad, a director at the office of the Senate chairman, told Reuters.