Leaders arrive in locked-down Islamabad for Shanghai Cooperation gathering

Kyrgyz Prime Minister Akylbek Zhaparov landed in Islamabad on Tuesday to attend a heads-of-government gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Pakistani government said, with the city under tight security lockdown.

The meeting of the SCO, a Eurasian security and political group formed in 2001 by Russia and China, is the highest profile event hosted by the South Asian nation in years.

Chinese Premiere Li Qiang is already in Pakistan, while seven more prime ministers of other member and observer states, including Russian Premier Mikhail Mishustin, will also be participating in person.

The event has garnered more attention with India sending External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the first Indian foreign minister to visit Pakistan in nearly a decade as relations remain frosty between the two nuclear powers.

Jaishankar arrived in Pakistan on Tuesday. Both sides have said no bilateral meeting is planned.

Indian government spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said this month the agenda of Jaishankar's visit would strictly follow the SCO schedule, which is due to discuss trade, humanitarian and social issues.

"The Indian foreign minister has not requested a bilateral meeting, nor have we extended an invitation to them," Pakistan Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said on Sunday.

Pakistan's former foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was in Goa last year — also a rare visit — for an SCO meeting where he and Jaishankar were involved in a verbal spat.

Former Indian foreign minister Sushma Swaraj was the last to visit Pakistan in 2015, arriving for a summit on Afghanistan.

The threat alert has been high in the South Asian nation ahead of the SCO summit, especially after the killing of two Chinese engineers on October 6 and shooting deaths of 21 miners on October 11.