ISLAMABAD: Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly Shehbaz Sharif joined the opposition in calling for an investigation into reports of an Israeli aircraft landing on Pakistani territory last week.
Earlier today, Shehbaz had accepted Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s clarification on reports of a suspected landing by an alleged Israeli plane in Pakistan.
Shehbaz later supported calls for a probe into the alleged incident, which resulted in severe criticism on government, by the Jamaat-e-Ulema Islam-Fazl.
In the National Assembly today, JUI-F leader Abdul Wasay rejected Qureshi’s explanation and said that a committee be constituted comprising government and opposition members.
Addressing a session of the National Assembly earlier today, Qureshi rejected the reports – which claimed an Israeli aircraft had recently landed in Islamabad – as “baseless” and “unfounded” and said there was no truth to the rumours.
He said he had already dismissed the reports 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.
He further shared that it was in the interests of Pakistan to reduce the divide in the Muslim Ummah.
Opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif, who attended the session on production orders, rose from his seat and said he was accepting the foreign minister’s clarification on the matter of the alleged Israeli plane.
An Israeli journalist last week had sparked a storm of speculation on social media when he tweeted that an aircraft flew from Tel Aviv to Islamabad.
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.
