Pakistan Saturday ruled out the possibility of reducing relations with the European Union after a row over alleged misbehaving to one of its parliamentarians by the Belgian authorities.

"There is no possibility of scaling down relations with the European Union," Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman Jalil Abbas Jilani told an Iran news agency in Islamabad, stressing that Pakistan and the European Union enjoyed "strong ties, and the

union's policies had no connection to what happened in Brussels." He added that the European Union was an important partner of Pakistan engaging in various economic projects in the country.

However, Jilani said formal protest had been lodged by summoning the envoys of Belgium, the European Union and Holland, which holds the current presidency of the European Union, in Islamabad after a cleric and senator Maulana Samiul Haq earlier this week was detained by the Brussels police for two hours at the Brussels airport and then asked to leave the country. The detention came despite the fact that Haq was member of a Pakistani senate delegation scheduled to hold talks with the European Parliament. Being described as a pro-Taliban figure, Haq is reported to have trained pro-Taliban students and dispatched them across the border to Afghanistan. Pakistan National Assembly (lower house of the parliament) Thursday unanimously adopted a resolution against the "indecent" attitude of the Belgian government toward the Pakistani senate delegation in Brussels. The Pakistani government also made a strong demarche over the misbehaving and termed it "entirely uncalled for and totally unacceptable."

Source: Xinhua