Islamabad ridicules Delhi hijack drama

The hijack drama in India was a "diabolical plot" aimed to harm Pakistan which foiled it by taking prompt measures, Pakistani officials said yesterday as they heaped ridicule on rival India where commandos stormed an airliner after what turned out to be a false alarm that the plane had been hijacked.

"We had prior information about the Indian conspiracy to hijack a domestic airliner, land it in Pakistan and blow it up," a senior intelligence official said. The motive was to"malign Pakistan and the freedom struggle in Indian-occupied Kashmir in the eyes of the world amid the current international campaign against terrorism."

"Pakistan closed its airspace immediately and put the air force on high alert with orders to shoot down any intruder," the official said, adding the Indians abandoned the plot after realising it would not succeed.

Indian ministers and officials broke the news of the hijacking after an Alliance Air Boeing took off from Mumbai on Wednesday. They kept the story going for four hours before suddenly announcing that the plane had landed at New Delhi and the whole affair was caused by a false alarm, the official said.

"As India is deeply frustrated by Pakistan becoming a frontline state in the international campaign against terrorism they can go to any extent out of sheer desperation," Major General Rashid Qureshi, Director General of the Inter-Services Public Relations Directorate, said.

Only days before there was this bomb blast in Srinagar that "had Indian intrigue written all over it," Qureshi said. He said India had been trying to take advantage of the situation and fuel its propaganda against Pakistan and the just Kashmiri movement since the present crisis erupted after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11.

"This was a total farce," foreign ministry spokesman Riaz Mohammad Khan said, adding that the initial reporting of the incident by the Indian broadcast media had sought to link Pakistan and Kashmiri separatists with the supposed hijacking.

"We have noted and the world must have noted the enthusiasm with which the Indian media tried to exploit this farce to malign Pakistan and malign the Kashmiri freedom movement," Khan said.

Khan also told reporters the whole world was aware of the "cruel repression in Indian-held Kashmir to crush the people's struggle for self-determination." Referring to the UN resolutions on Kashmir, the spokesman said the international community wanted a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir problem to bring peace and stability to the entire region. Khan said Pakistan was fully prepared to meet any security threat from India.