Pakistan government clears players for IPL

Pakistan's cricketers have been given the green light to participate in this year's IPL by the country's sports ministry, but they were told that their security would be their own and their IPL franchise's responsibility.

"The players can individually decide what they want to do and we have no objections to them going to India for the IPL matches," sports minister Pir Aftab Shah Jillani said. "The [Pakistan Cricket] Board has asked for our comments for individual players and not a national team so we have given our NOC [no objection certificate] and sent it to the President's Secretariat for further action."

He explained that the ministry did not allow the national hockey and squash teams to travel to India for international tournaments earlier because they had to take into consideration the tense relations between India and Pakistan in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks.

The Pakistan players stood to lose all their money from their lucrative IPL contracts if their government had blocked them from participating in the tournament. Some IPL franchises had also expressed uncertainty over the future of Pakistan players on their books, mostly because the current political climate could lead to extended visa restrictions.