- Had earlier accepted govt’s clarification that the reports are ‘baseless’, ‘unfounded’
ISLAMABAD: Opposition leader in the National Assembly Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday joined the Opposition benches in demanding the formation of a committee to probe the alleged landing of an Israeli aircraft on Pakistan’s territory.
However, earlier in the same day, Shehbaz had accepted Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s clarification on reports about an Israeli aircraft landing in Pakistan which the foreign minister termed “baseless” and “unfounded”.
Jamiat Ulama-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) leader Abdul Wasay had rejected Qureshi’s explanation and said that a committee should be constituted comprising government and opposition members.
Qureshi, however, had said that there was no truth to the rumours, adding that he had dismissed the reports already but was reiterating an unequivocal rejection of the rumours to take the Parliament into confidence.
Qureshi also told the House that there were “no conditions attached to Saudi Arabia’s loan package to Pakistan; the Kingdom had not imposed any condition on the country to send the army to Yemen”.
Following Qureshi’s clarification, Shehbaz Sharif who attended the NA session on production orders said he accepted the foreign minister’s clarification on the matter.
Earlier, President Dr Arif Alvi had also dismissed reports about the Israeli aircraft landing in Pakistan and termed these reports as “baseless” before he departed for a three-day visit to Turkey.
The president spoke to the media at the Islamabad airport and had said, “We are not establishing any relations with Israel.”
Human Rights Minister Dr Shireen Mazari also took to Twitter to rebuff the impression that a plane from the Jewish state recently landed in Pakistan for a brief period under mysterious circumstances.
“Interesting how Israeli media, with a plane fake news, managed to divert Pakistani media’s attention away from the important security issue of the Netanyahu’s Oman visit, which has strategic implications for Pakistan if Israel gets a permanent foothold in Oman where US military already has a presence.”
On October 26, Avi Scharf, editor of Israeli newspaper Haaretz, said in his tweet that the alleged plane did not directly fly from the Israeli capital into Islamabad. Instead, it followed a trick flight route by landing in Amman briefly to make it look like an Amman-Islamabad flight rather than a Tel Aviv-Islamabad flight.
The Israeli journalist’s tweets had triggered a range of rumours on social media, with Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Ahsan Iqbal being one of many seeking an explanation from the government on the matter.
Responding to Iqbal’s tweet, Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry had said that the government would neither hold any secret dialogue with India nor Israel.
“The truth is that Imran Khan is not Nawaz Sharif. We will not hold secret dialogues with Modi or Israel. Nobody needs to worry as Pakistan is in safe hands,” Chaudhry wrote.
The claim was also rejected by Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) on Saturday, which categorically rejected any news regarding landing of a rumoured Israeli aircraft in Pakistan.
“There is absolutely no truth to the rumours that any Israeli plane landed at any airport in Pakistan. No such plane landed at any airport in Pakistan,” the authority had clarified in a notification.
Following the CAA’s notification, the Israeli journalist in a series of tweets provided details he had and did not have about the flight.
Pakistan and Israel do not have diplomatic relations. Hence, airplanes registered in either country are not allowed to enter each other’s airspace.
The BBC, after an initial investigation into the matter, established that the aircraft was a ‘Global Express XRS’ built by Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier.
It carries the serial number 9394 and was registered in the self-governing British Crown dependency Isle of Man on February 22, 2017.
According to its registration details, the aircraft is owned by Multibird Overseas Ltd which is listed in the British Virgin Islands. These details rule out the speculation that it was an ‘Israeli’ aircraft.
