Inspector-General (IG) Islamabad Qazi Jameel-ur-Rehman, during a press conference on Monday in Islamabad, said that the police have formed five teams to probe the “abduction” of the Afghan ambassador’s daughter.
“We traced the entire route on which the daughter of the Afghan ambassador travelled and also traced both the taxi drivers who drove her,” he said. “Before going to the city’s F-9 Park, the ambassador’s daughter first went to the F-6 area,” added IG Islamabad.
He said the purported abduction of the Afghan envoy’s daughter was a complete “blind case” and they collected data of around 300 CCTV cameras installed in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.
As per police investigation, her abduction has not been proven yet, he maintained.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, said, “Pakistan wants to arrest and punish the culprits involved in alleged kidnapping as soon as possible.”
The foreign minister further added, “I told the Afghan ambassador that we are aware of the security concerns he is having, therefore, we have beefed up all Afghan diplomats’ security.”
National Security Adviser Dr Moeed Yusuf said on Monday that Pakistan was currently a target of “hybrid warfare” and an entire network of information warfare was being used against the country.
He said fake accounts and bots were being used to create a “narrative” against Pakistan, including regarding the incident involving the Afghan envoy’s daughter.
Sharing slides on data gathered by the government, Yusuf said hashtags were being trended on a daily basis to create false impressions including that Pakistan “is doing something [wrong] in Afghanistan” and that the security situation in Pakistan was poor.
“This is part of an orchestrated campaign of which various fronts have been opened against Pakistan,” he said, adding that the same accounts that did “fake propaganda” regarding Balochistan or Kashmir were also doing propaganda ever since the alleged abduction incident took place. According to Yusuf, some of these accounts were operated from inside Pakistan, while the rest were controlled from Afghanistan, India, and the West.
FM Qureshi said that he spoke to his Afghan counterpart this morning and discussed the steps that the Government of Pakistan has so far taken to investigate the matter.
“We have assured the Afghan government that Prime Minister Imran Khan is personally overseeing the probe into the alleged abduction of the Afghan ambassador’s daughter,” he said.
Qureshi reiterated that the Afghanistan government should reconsider its decision to pull out its ambassador and diplomats from Pakistan, adding that if they want the investigation to be transparent, it will have to cooperate with Pakistan.
“We don’t have any intention to hide anything… we need their [Afghanistan’s] cooperation to take the investigation to its logical conclusion,” he added.
Earlier today, Foreign Minister Qureshi informed his Afghan counterpart Mohammad Haneef Atmar that the security of the Afghan embassy and consulate in Pakistan had been further enhanced.
The development comes a day after the Afghanistan government decided to withdraw its ambassador and senior diplomats from Pakistan, a move that Islamabad termed as “unfortunate and regrettable”.
