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Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif will visit Astana in April, the Kazakh foreign ministry said.

Askar Musinov, Kazakh Deputy Foreign Minister invited Zarif to visit his country. “Zarif gratefully accepted the invitation of his Kazakh counterpart to pay an official visit to Kazakhstan in April this year,” the report reads.

Kazakhstan will become the first country, which Zarif intends to visit during his Central Asian tour.

The bilateral political consultations were held between the foreign ministries of Kazakhstan and Iran in Tehran on February 1 as part of the cooperation program.

A Kazakh delegation was headed by Musinov and Iran’s delegation by Ibrahim Rahimpur, Deputy Foreign Minister.

The sides discussed the prospects for further development of bilateral cooperation. In this regard, the importance of the Iranian president’s state visit to Kazakhstan in September 2014 was stressed. The need of implementing the reached agreements and the historical importance of commissioning the Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran railway in December 2014, which expanded the regional trade, was also emphasized.

During the consultations, the gratitude was expressed to the Iranian side for supporting Kazakhstan's candidacy for a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for 2017-2018, President Nazarbayev’s initiative to create the Islamic Organization for Food Security within the OIC, as well as to hold the EXPO 2017 international exhibition in Astana.

Iran’s side stressed the constructive role of Kazakhstan in the negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program and thanked for holding two rounds of multilateral negotiations in Almaty in 2013.

A meeting was held with Iran’s deputy foreign minister. The legal and consular issues were discussed during the meeting.

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