April 3, 2003	Thursday	Muharram 30, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, April 2: After participating in five days of hectic debate and parleys with the opposition to pass a consensus resolution on Iraq at the Senate, the foreign minister, Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, somehow forgot the location of his office at the Parliament House on Wednesday.

Soon after the minister came out of the Senate hall after a policy statement on the Iraq situation, parliamentary reporters pressed him for the copies of his speech.

Mr Kasuri asked the reporters to follow him to his office. Saying this the minister started walking towards a corridor along with several journalists. When he arrived near the speaker’s chamber a few yards before the National Assembly library, a journalist realized that the minister was going in the wrong direction. He then asked Mr Kasuri where he was heading. At this the foreign minister stopped, turned around and said: “It was somewhere there”. He was then told that his office was at the other end of the building.

“Thank God at least we are on the right floor,” remarked a reporter of a local Urdu daily, who was also following the minister.

Along the way the minister was repeatedly asked by the journalist whether the wording of the resolution expressed ‘dismay’ or condemnation. However, Mr Kasuri replied that he would not comment on this and whatever he had stated in the House was the unanimous resolution.

When asked as to how he managed to convince the opposition on the wording of the resolution, he said the opposition had been with the government from day one and there was also a realization that the Senate should passed a resolution on Iraq.

He said the foreign ministry would try its level best to facilitate the Parliamentary Doctors’ Forum in their efforts to help the Iraqi brethren.

Finally, when the minister reached his office, he instructed his staff to provide copies of his speech to the journalists.