Pakistani minister embroiled in hug row told to stay

ISLAMABAD, May 23 (Reuters) Pakistan's Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has rejected the resignation of a female cabinet minister who had come under fire from a hardline Islamist cleric for hugging her parachute instructor in France.

Nilofar Bakhtiar, one of the three women ministers in the Pakistani cabinet, had asked to be relieved in a letter to Aziz that was also faxed to newspapers.

''I have not accepted her resignation,'' Aziz was quoted as saying by state-run Associated Press of Pakistan while talking to reporters late yesterday.

Bakhtiar, who heads the Tourism Ministry, embraced her elderly instructor after completing a jump in March to raise money for victims of an earthquake that killed 73,000 people in Pakistan in October 2005.

A pro-Taliban cleric issued a decree, soon after Pakistani newspapers published a photograph of the hug, calling on the government to sack 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 stepped down as head of the women's wing of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League.

Bakhtiar was not immediately available for comment after Aziz rejected her resignation.

Criticism from radical clerics cannot to be taken lightly in Pakistan, given the influence wielded by conservatives in the male-dominated Muslim society.

In February, a Muslim zealot shot dead a woman minister of the government of Punjab because he thought women should not be in politics. The gunman was sentenced to death in March.

REUTERS RJ BST1709