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Foreign Office spokesman Asim Iftikhar on Thursday said Pakistan has formally raised with Afghan officials the issue of U.N.-designated Masood Azhar hiding in their country, stressing Islamabad and the global community have sufficient reason to believe there are still ungoverned spaces within Afghanistan that terrorists are using as safe havens.
Noting Azhar was a proclaimed offender in Pakistan, who was wanted in numerous terrorism-related cases, Iftikhar said multiple deadly cross-border terrorist attacks from Afghanistan had increased Pakistan’s legitimate concerns about the presence of terrorist safe havens in the war-torn state. He urged Kabul to take concrete and verifiable actions to deliver on assurances that they would not allow anyone to use Afghan soil against any country.
A Taliban spokesman, a day earlier, said reports about Azhar hiding in Afghanistan were false, adding that such terrorist organizations could only operate on Pakistan’s soil.
Neelum-Jhelum
In his briefing, the Foreign Office spokesman rejected Indian media reports alleging Chinese engineers and staff had abandoned repair work on the 969MW Neelum-Jhelum hydropower project. Accusing India of “fake news,” he said a fault had been detected in the project and it was currently undergoing remedial works.
Stressing that work was proceeding smoothly and the project was estimated to be completed in 2023, he said reports of work stoppage were aimed at misleading the public and also served as propaganda meant to fuel controversy between Pakistan and China. Such efforts, he emphasized, would fail, as Beijing and Islamabad were all-weather strategic cooperative partners.
The spokesman also discussed the ongoing human rights abuses in India-held Kashmir, saying three more young Kashmiris had been martyred in fake encounters, bringing to 670 the total number of people killed since Aug. 5, 2019; and 150 since the start of this year.
“Today the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) is the world’s most heavily militarized zone, which has in fact been turned into the world’s largest prison—where people are not allowed to speak freely; APHC leadership, youth, journalists, civil society and human rights defenders are jailed and silenced,” he said, and urged the global community to hold India accountable for its gross and systematic violations of human rights in IIOJK.