Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, who is leaving the country for the United States on May 5 to attend a special UN meeting on children, is likely to meet British prime minister Tony Blair while on the way back home, minister for information and cabinet spokesman Jayaprakash Prasad Gupta said here today. Deuba will earlier meet president George Bush in Washington.

“Diplomatic exercises are going on to make an appointment with the British prime minister. We have taken this as an important event,” he said. Gupta said Deuba’s meeting with president Bush was going to be somewhat exceptional as “an appointment for a visiting head of government with the president, when the former specially arrives for UN meetings, happens very rarely.”

Gupta said it was the duty of the government ‘to inform the US regarding the terrorists in our backyard while the US was leading the war against global terrorism.’ “US has started to support the government in the war against terror which it had committed during the visit of Collin Powell in the country. Normally, no head of the government arrived in USA for the UN meet can have an appointment with the US president, but our prime minister is meeting him in the Oval Office of the White House. This is a positive gesture for us.”

Gupta regretted that a section of press had been describing the visit of remarkable importance even in terms of “honeymoon” trip. “It is very distasteful,” he said. The minister claimed that Deuba’s meeting with both leaders would play an important role to crush terrorists, who he said were loosing grounds everywhere. “They succeed to fool international community in the names of so called human rights and the deprived class, but have been exposed themselves as terrorists in the past few months,” he said.

The cabinet spokesman was also in a bad blood with party leaders who had ‘intentionally misunderstood’ the awards declared by the government for the terrorists. “It has been twisted in the way as if the government had asked to kill first then bring the body, but we have never said that. We intended to get information. Not only about those alive but we also want information of the dead. They are deforming faces of the dead and even beheading to conceal the identity. We want information about them too,” said Gupta describing the reason behind declaring awards for the ‘dead or alive’ terrorists and added, “It is pity that even responsible party leaders also misunderstood or acted misunderstood about the seriousness of the matter.”

He urged not to take the award issue lightly and claimed, “Our security personnel are in high morale and encouraged by the public support they are getting after the declaring awards.”