New Delhi: Pakistan’s Joint Investigation Team (JIT) that visited India last week has questioned the evidence presented by India on the Pathankot airbase attack, including the claim that the attackers had come from Pakistan, according to a Pakistani news report on Tuesday.
The report posted on Pakistan Today news website said that India exaggerated the impact of the raid to “malign” Pakistan and gain world attention.
The comments are unlikely to go down well in India, which has been waiting to see how Pakistan proceeds with the investigation before it decides to engage its neighbour.
It also gave ammunition to Indian opposition parties who had raised objections to the Narendra Modi-led government allowing a Pakistani military spy agency representative, who was part of the JIT, access to an Indian military base.
India believes that the Pakistani spy agency—the Inter Services Intelligence or ISI—supports anti-India militant groups like the Jaish-e-Mohammed that India has blamed for the 2 January raid.
According to the Pakistan report, within hours of the assault, all the attackers were shot dead by the Indian security forces, contradicting Indian defence minister Manohar Parikkar’s statement that it had taken Indian security personnel 36 hours to hunt down the militants and some more hours to remove booby traps and planted explosives.
“The Indian authorities made it a three-day drama to get maximum attention from the world community in order to malign Pakistan,” the report said, adding that India used the attack as a tool to expand its “vicious propaganda” against Pakistan “without having any solid evidence to back the claim”.
“The report concludes that the Pathankot attack looked like another false flag operation fully facilitated by the Indian army just to put the blame on Pakistan,” the report quoted an unidentified source as saying.
The Pakistani JIT was allowed in the Pathankot airbase from a narrow passage out of a breach in the compound wall rather than the main entry gate, an unidentified source was quoted as saying by the news report. The team was denied the opportunity to collect evidence from the site of the attack, it said, adding that no major damage was done to the base and that the Indian authorities showed the JIT the place from where the gunmen had entered.
The JIT will finalise its report and hand it over to Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif “in the next few days”, the Pakistan Today report said.
There were no immediate comments from New Delhi. But in the past, there have been many statements from India clearly indicating that New Delhi would wait and see how Pakistan proceeds with the probe before India engages Pakistan.
Opposition parties, however, were less circumspect.
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) national convener and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, in a press meet in the New Delhi, attacked Modi for what he called letting the country down.
“India has been cheated by the (Modi’s) Bharatiya Janata Party. Prime Minster Narendra Modi has given in to the demands of Pakistan. Those who attacked us were called to investigate. Now there are reports coming in that the team has said that India created the entire attack on their own.
“In India’s history no other government has bent down in front of Pakistan as PM Modi has,” Kejriwal said.
The attack cast a shadow over the just resurrected India-Pakistan peace process that was to see the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan meet on 15 January. That meeting, which was to decide the future course of engagement, was called off in the aftermath of the Pathankot raid.
Earlier in December, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj had travelled to Pakistan and announced the start of a “comprehensive bilateral dialogue” to discuss all disputes with Pakistan. This was followed by a visit to Lahore by Modi, the first visit to Pakistan by an Indian prime minister in more than a decade.
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