A report in a Pakistani newspaper on Tuesday indicated that Islamabad might end up accusing New Delhi of stage-managing the terrorist attack on the Pathankot airbase.
Sources in New Delhi dubbed as “total concoction” a report on “Pakistan Today” newspaper, which signalled that Islamabad might return to its usual “state of denial” on the terror-strike on the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot in Punjab.
The report claimed that the neighbouring country’s investigators, who visited Delhi and Pathankot from March 27 to April 1 to probe the attack, had concluded that India had prior information about the attackers and had used the attack as a tool to expand its “vicious propaganda” against Pakistan, “without having any solid evidence to back the claim”.
New Delhi made it clear that no substantive progress towards proposed resumption of the stalled bilateral dialogue could be expected unless and until Islamabad took credible steps to bring to justice for Pakistan-based terror-plotters responsible for the latest attack in India.
The “Pakistan Today” quoted from what it claimed to be the report the investigators from Pakistan prepared after visiting India. The report claimed that India failed to establish that the attackers entered from Pakistan. The report, according to the newspaper, would be submitted to Pakistan Prime Minister M Nawaz Sharif soon.
India refrained from officially reacting to the report appeared in the newspaper in Pakistan. But sources in New Delhi contradicted the purported report and said that Pakistani investigators had taken onboard the “detailed evidence” shared with them by the officials of the National Investigation Agency. “Since the Pakistani investigators collected evidences in India in accordance with a Pakistani law applicable on Pakistani citizens committing an offence in a foreign country, the involvement of Pakistanis in the attack in Pathankot is self-evident,” a source in New Delhi said. Pakistani investigators had informed the NIA officials in New Delhi that they had collected “admissible evidence” in India under the provision of Section 188 of Pakistan’s Code of Criminal Procedure.