ISLAMABAD, May 23: Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has rejected the resignation of a woman cabinet minister who had come under fire from a cleric for having been embraced by her parachute instructor in France.

Ms Nilofar Bakhtiar, one of the three women ministers in the cabinet, had asked to be relieved in a letter to Mr Aziz.

“I have not accepted her resignation,” Mr Aziz was quoted as saying by the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan while talking to reporters late on Tuesday.

Ms Bakhtiar, who heads the tourism ministry, was embraced by her elderly instructor after she completed a jump in March to raise money for victims of an earthquake that killed 73,000 people in Pakistan in October 2005.

A local cleric issued a decree, soon after newspapers published a photograph of the hug, calling on the government to sack Ms Bakhtiar for “obscenity”.

At the time, she shrugged off the cleric’s criticism, saying she would do another jump for a good cause, but in early May she was replaced as head of the women’s wing of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League by another woman minister.

—Agencies