US Senator John Kerry speaks to a rally on Capitol Hill in Washington. — Photo by AP

WASHINGTON, April 20: A US apology to Pakistan over the Salala incident got further delayed when a senior American senator, who was expected to take the apology to Islamabad, postponed his visit.

“I can tell you with certainty that Senator Kerry has no plans to visit Pakistan,” the Senator’s spokesperson Jodi Seth told Dawn.

Diplomatic sources in Washington, however, said that Pakistani media reports claiming that Senator Kerry was planning to visit Pakistanlater this month were not wrong.

“The senator apparently changed his mind after the Pakistani government leaked the apology story to the media,” said one source who did not want to be identified.

Senator Kerry heads the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is a former Democratic presidential candidate, which places him in acomfortable position to help out the Obama administration when it finds itself in a tight spot.

This is an election year in the United States and because of the negative media coverage Pakistan has received after Osama bin Laden’s discovery in Abbottabad last year, the Obama administration feels that a public apology to Pakistan could hurt Mr Obama re-election campaign.

“So the Obama administration asked Senator Kerry to go with an apology,” said a diplomatic source. “But neither Mr Kerry nor the administration wanted pre-visit media coverage.”

The source explained that when Pakistani officials leaked the story to the media, the Americans felt that the Pakistanis had ignored their request not to publicise the visit and Senator Kerry decided to call it off.

President Obama’s ‘point man’ for the region, Marc Grossman, however, is expected to arrive in Islamabad next week as planned. Mr Grossman had to postpone his visit twice because the hosts first wanted to complete a parliamentary review of bilateral ties.

Mr Grossman’s visit aims at removing the bitterness created by recent events and the number one item on his agenda would be the reopening of supply routes to Afghanistan that Pakistan closed after a Nato raid on a Pakistani post that killed 24 soldiers.