President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will visit Pakistan Monday morning on the first leg of his three-nation regional tour that would later take him to Sri Lanka and India.
Ahmadinejad would hold separate talks with his Pakistani counterpart Pervez Musharraf and the country’s Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, IRNA reported.
The president would leave Islamabad for Colombo on the second leg of his regional tour to discuss promotion of bilateral and regional ties, as well as cooperation with Sri Lankan officials.
During the visit to Colombo, several documents are expected to be signed by Iranian and Sri Lankan officials for promoting bilateral cooperation.
The Iranian president is also expected to inspect a number of joint ventures carried out by the experts of the two countries.
On the last leg of his three-nation tour, the president would arrive in New Delhi, India, on Tuesday afternoon.
During his daylong visit to India, President Ahmadinejad is expected to meet Indian counterpart Pratibha Patil and the country’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Ahmadinejad’s visits to India and Pakistan will also include talks on issues, including longstanding plans for a pipeline to supply Iranian gas to the two Asian states.
The three countries have discussed the pipeline for years. They have agreed in principle on a pricing formula but India dropped out of talks in mid-2007, saying it first wanted to resolve issues with Pakistan such as transit fees.
India and Pakistan said on Friday they were just days or weeks away from finalizing terms on the cross-border pipeline.
Iran and Pakistan had previously said they would go ahead with the project without India if necessary.
“It looks like arriving at this agreement will not be out of reach,“ Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told a news conference.
“And it is natural that the matter--one of the most important issues of interest by the three parties--will be discussed in the trip by the president. We are hoping the project...will be finalized soon,“ he said.
The $7.6 billion project has been dubbed “the Peace Pipeline“ because of the mutual benefits it will bring to India and Pakistan, which have fought three wars since they were divided by the partition of India in 1947.
The pipeline would initially transport 60 million cubic meters of gas (2.2 billion cubic feet) daily to Pakistan and India, half for each country. The pipeline’s capacity would later rise to 150 million cubic meters.
Iran has the world’s second largest reserves of gas after Russia, but has been slow to develop exports.

Tareq Aziz, former deputy premier and the international face of the Iraqi Baathist regime under executed dictator Saddam, enters the dock on Tuesday over his alleged role in the execution of 42 Baghdad merchants in 1992.
Aziz and seven other henchmen of the deposed and hanged dictator, including “Chemical“ Ali Hasan Al-Majid, are accused of executing the merchants after blaming them for hiking food prices when Iraq was under UN sanctions, Alalam.ir reported.
Iraqi prosecutors say the victims were arrested in Baghdad’s wholesale markets and executed after a speedy trial in 1992.
They also claim that the former regime seized their money and property.
The latest trial is the fourth to be conducted by the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT) which was established to try former Saddam regime officials.
Aziz and Majid, who is already on death row after being convicted of genocide for overseeing the killings of Kurdish villagers in 1988, are the two most high-profile defendants in the new trial.
The other six are Watban Ibrahim Al-Hassan, half-brother of Saddam and former interior minister; Sabbawi Ibrahim Al-Hassan, chief of public security from 1991 to 1995; Mizban Khudier Hadi, a member of the former Revolutionary Command Council; Saddam’s secretary Abid Hamid Mahmud; Ahmed Hussein Khudier, a former finance minister; and ex-governor of the central bank Essam Rasheed Khuwaish.
The trial of Aziz, who surrendered to US troops in April 2003, will be presided over by Kurdish judge Rauf Rasheed Abdel Rahman, who sentenced Saddam to death in 2006 for his role in the killing of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail after an assassination attempt against him in 1982.
Saddam was hanged on December 30, 2006. His cohorts Taha Yassin Ramadan, Barzan Ibrahim Al-Tikriti and Awad Ahmed al-Bandar met the same fate after being convicted for the Dujail killings.
Majid and two other former regime officials are on death row for the Kurdish killings during the so-called Anfal campaign in the final year of the eight-year Iraq-Iran war.
Majid is also on trial for his role in crushing the 1991 Shiite uprising that followed the first Persian Gulf War, the third trial being conducted by the IHT.
Tareq Aziz has spent more than five years in US custody since his surrender, and his lawyers have often complained of his ill health.
Little has been heard of Aziz since he gave himself up, except occasional health-related statements from his lawyer and his family.
Aziz, in his early 70s, is said to have had cerebral embolism, which occurs when a blood clot creates a blockage in an artery in the brain and is a common cause of strokes.
In December 2006, his son said he had suffered a heart attack in custody.
Aziz was born in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul to an Assyrian Christian family. He changed his given name, Michael Yuhanna, to Tareq Aziz.
He had known Saddam since the 1950s and despite being kept outside the closed circle of Saddam’s Sunni Arab colleagues, he became one of the regime’s best-known figures for his anti-West tirades.

Automatic gunfire broke Saturday out at a ceremony marking the defeat of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, forcing dignitaries including Afghanistan’s president to take cover.
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