ISLAMABAD, Jan 27: Inter-Services Public Relations director-general Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan has been posted out from his present high-profile position and transferred to a professionally important command post as the GOC Lahore.

He will be replaced by GOC Bhawalpur Maj-Gen Waheed Arshad, who is expected to take charge of his new, and in someway more challenging assignment, in the first week of March.

Confirming the transfer and reshuffle, Maj-Gen Sultan told Dawn it was an honour for him to be going on a command posting and that too as the GOC Lahore. He also praised his successor whom he described as a “competent person” and said his selection as the new ISPR director-general was done quite carefully.

Maj-Gen Sultan was appointed as head of the armoured forced public relations department in June 2003. He had replaced a more influential ISPR chief Maj-Gen Rashid Qureshi, who had made his name while defending Pakistan’s position during the Kargil conflict and later by pleading Gen Pervez Musharraf’s case as a “reluctant coup maker” in October 1999.