Pakistan minister says we entered India and killed them, Pulwama was a success
New Delhi: A minister in Pakistan’s Imran Khan government, Fawad Chaudhry, Thursday admitted to the country’s involvement in the 14 February 2019 Pulwama attack that killed 40 CRPF personnel.
Speaking in the Pakistan parliament, the National Assembly, Chaudhry said, “Humne Hindustan ko ghus ke mara hai… wahaan pe. Pulwama main jo humari kamyabi hai, woh Imran Khan ki leadership mein is kaum ki kamyabi hai (We entered India and killed. Our success in Pulwama, under the leadership of Imran Khan, is a victory of our community),” he said.
“Uske hissedar aap aur hum sab hai (all of us are party to it),” he added.
Chaudhry was responding to a comment made by opposition leader Ayaz Sadiq of Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N). Speaking to a news channel Wednesday, Sadiq had said Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa’s “legs were shaking” during a meeting last February when their foreign minister told parliamentary leaders that India would mount an attack if Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, captured by Pakistan that month, wasn’t released.
Varthaman was captured last February during a dogfight between the Indian and Pakistan air forces that followed an IAF operation where Indian jets entered Pakistani territory and destroyed a terrorist camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammed, the outfit believed responsible for the Pulwama attack.
Chaudhry said Sadiq was “blatantly lying”.
On 25 August, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which is probing the Pulwama attack, had filed a charge sheet naming JeM chief Maulana Masood Azhar, his brother Abdul Rauf Asghar and others for “carrying out the attack at the behest of Pakistan”.
The charge sheet also mentioned that the explosives used in the attack — ammonium nitrate, nitro-glycerine and RDX — came from Pakistan in batches over a period of four months. Sources in the NIA had said at the time that investigators had prepared a “watertight charge sheet” based on technical and forensic evidence that proves Pakistan’s role in the attack.
Pakistan still in grey list
The statement by Fawad Chaudhry is crucial because it comes at a time when Pakistan has narrowly escaped being blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
The Paris-based terror financing watchdog kept the country in its ‘grey list’ at its meeting earlier this month.
The plenary, the FATF’s highest decision-making body, will next meet in February 2021 and has given Pakistan time until then to meet all the 27 parameters, especially those that pertain to imposing sanctions on terrorist outfits.
“Pakistan has made progress… It has largely completed 21 items of the 27; it definitely means that the world has become safer, but the six outstanding items mean the risks have not gone. The Pakistan government must do its best to repair and work on these outstanding six items,” FATF president Marcus Pleyer said at a virtual press conference.
Source:- The Print
