Lucknow/Saharanpur: The Darul Uloom Deoband on Saturday asserted that there were no directives to keep women journalists away from covering the visit of Afghanistan foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi to the seminary.

\"There were no restrictions from the Afghan foreign minister's office about who would attend,\" Deoband PRO Ashraf Usmani, also the media in-charge of Muttaqi’s Saturday programme, told PTI, and dismissed as \"baseless\" claims that women journalists were kept away.

This followed a controversy over the absence of female journalists from a press conference of the visiting Afghanistan Minister in New Delhi a day earlier, with the Opposition terming it as \"unacceptable\" and an \"insult to women\".

The Islamic seminary's clarification came regarding a public event of the Afg

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