Arrival of 'Israeli aircraft' in Islamabad: Minister responds as Ahsan Iqbal seeks explanation

A tweet from a Israeli journalist that an aircraft flew from Tel Aviv to Islamabad has  sparked a storm of rumors on social media.

According to BBC the  plane was not registered in Israel and it actually flew from Amman.

 Avi Scharf, editor of Israeli newspaper Haretz who first tweeted about the alleged arrival of the aircraft, said the plane did not  directly fly from the Israeli capital into Islamabad. 

He, however  spoke of trick the  pilot  allegedly may have used  to make it look like a flight from Amman-Islamabad instead of a Tel Aviv-Islamabad flight.

The BBC quoted him as saying that after taking off from Israel the plane landed in Amman and after a gap of 5 minutes it took off for Islamabad.

Scharf claimed plane visited Islamabad on October 24.

Quoting the BBC report, PML-N leader Ahsan Iqbal took to Twitter and sought explanation from the government.

Responding to Iqbal, Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry asked him not to worry as Pakistan was in the safe hands.

"The fact is that neither Imran is a Nawaz Sharif nor he has a fake Aristotle like you in his cabinet. We will neither hold secret talks with Modi nor Israel," he wrote in Urdu.

The minister, however, did not respond to the rumors that have been doing the rounds  on social media.

Later, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) issued a statement of its spokesman, who said no Israeli plane landed at any of Pakistan’s airports and that there is no truth whatsoever in the rumour because nothing like that happened in Pakistan.

It is pertinent to mention that both Pakistan and Israel do not have diplomatic relations. Hence, airplanes registered in either country are not permitted to enter each other’s airspace.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi also dismissed reports of an Israeli aircraft landing in Pakistan as fake and baseless. Addressing a press conference in Multan, Qureshi said that something which is not even real does not warrant a response.