Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan will not be able to hold his press conference today due to an extreme backache, said his spokesperson on Sunday.

Chaudhry Nisar has been recommended complete bed rest, and the press conference has been rescheduled for Monday at 5pm, according to his spokesperson.

Insisting that the press conference was delayed solely because of the interior minister's ill health, the spokesperson requested the media to avoid reading too much into the matter.

Earlier, TV channels had reported that federal ministers Saad Rafiq, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Rana Tanvir Hussain met Chaudhry Nisar on Saturday to persuade him to cancel his press conference where, the channels claimed, he would announce an end to his 35-year association with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

This was the only news report about him in recent days that was not rebutted by the interior ministry.

Interior minister is reported to have been unhappy with the way some PML-N leaders handled Panama Papers crisis

When contacted, a spokesperson for the minister had said that he had seen none of the ministers coming to Punjab House to hold a meeting with Chaudhry Nisar.

Abbasi said that he had not held a meeting with the interior minister on Saturday to convince him to change his plan. Giving his personal assessment, he said there were no differences in the PML-N, and that "Nisar is going nowhere”.

The interior minister had attended a meeting of the federal cabinet on July 13 where members of the cabinet reposed confidence in the PM’s leadership. But he skipped two important meetings of the PML-N after that.

While many members of the cabinet kept on issuing vociferous statements against the Joint Investigation Team constituted in the Panama Papers case and some even indirectly uttered remarks against the judiciary, Chaudhry Nisar was not among the crowd as he chose to remain silent on the issue at the height of the controversy.