Airport
staff say Israeli plane landed in Pakistan
Suddaf Chaudry Thursday 8 November 2018
In face of
government denials, pilot and employees at Pakistan's Noor Khan Airbase say
they saw aircraft arrive in Rawalpindi
Path of flight that left Tel Aviv, landed in Amman and then
Islamabad last month (Twitter/@avischarf)
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ISLAMABAD - After more than a week’s worth of Pakistani government
denials that an Israeliplane stopped off in Islamabad around the time of Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's surprise Oman trip, witnesses have revealed to
Middle East Eye that such an aircraft did in fact visit the country.
A pilot, who
spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject, told MEE
that the BizJet flight was in the air next to him on 24 October just
before it landed at Noor Khan Airbase, a military airbase in Rawalpindi.
Three members
of staff at the airbase confirmed the pilot’s account. One said he saw a car
pick up a delegation at the steps of the plane which returned several hours
later.
But a major
mystery still remains: what was the plane doing in Pakistan – which does not have diplomatic
relations with Israel - and who was on-board?
The uproar
began on 25 October when Avi Scharf, editor of the English edition of the
Israeli newspaper Haaretz, tweeted details of a flight map showing a private
jet flying from Tel Aviv to Islamabad.
Israeli
bizjet flew from TLV to
Islamabad, #Pakistan
, on the ground 10 hours,
and back to TLV.
Cleared flight-plan with usual 5min groundtime trick in Amman
M-ULTI glex
bizjet flew from TLV to
Islamabad, #Pakistan
, on the ground 10 hours,
and back to TLV.Cleared flight-plan with usual 5min groundtime trick in Amman
M-ULTI glex
Scharf’s tweets
sent Pakistani journalists and social media users into overdrive with some suggesting
that Netanyahu had arrived in Islamabad ahead of his surprise visit to Oman.
The government
quickly put a damper on the reports. Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority denied that an Israeli jet had
landed in the capital. At a workers convention, Pakistan’s information minister
Fawad Chaudhry described Scharf’s
tweet as propaganda.
He later told
MEE: “Look, there was no Israeli jet. There was only a UAE plane. That plane
was theirs.” Chaudry appeared to be referring to an Emirati delegation
that visited Islamabad on 26 October -
a day after Scharf tweeted.
Then last week,
Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told Pakistan’s parliament: “I
categorically deny that an Israeli plane landed in Pakistan.”
Pakistan’s
former interior minister, Ahsan Iqbal, challenged the
government’s position on Twitter: "The government should immediately
correct the situation." Chaudry responded, saying: "This is a fake
story. Don't worry. Pakistan is in safe hands."
Iqbal told MEE:
“I simply requested clarification about the series of events. I hope this does
not mean there is a fire under the smoke. It makes one wonder if they are
hiding something."
He added: “As
we have no independent means of verifying, I guess we have to accept the
government’s position at face value."
Asked by Middle East Eye to comment
on the observations of the Noor Khan employees, Chaudry said: "Our
position remains the same. There was no Israeli plane."
MEE contacted
Pakistan's foreign ministry about the airbase staffers' comments but at the
time of publication received no response.
Technically true
Analysts have
questioned whether Pakistani authorities were stating technical facts in an
effort to obscure the wider truth.
According to
data from Flightradar24, an aviation tracking website, the BizJet flight took
off from Tel Aviv on 23 October at 20:00 UTC (GMT), landing in Amman on 24
October.
Scharf
theorised that this was done so that the flight would be given a new
transponder code, making it harder to trace.
From Amman, the
jet reappeared on the radar in Islamabad ten hours later. Then, on 24 October
at 00:40 UTC, it returned to Tel Aviv.
Ian Petchenik
from Flightradar24 told MEE: “The aircraft departed and returned to Tel Aviv
via Amman and was tracked eastbound and westbound over Pakistan at two
different points in time.”
The plane was registered in
the Isle of Man last year to a company called Multibird Overseas LTD, but the
final ownership of the plane remains unclear. Simon Williams, director of the
Isle of Man’s Civil Aviation Administration refused to respond to MEE’s
questions.
So when
government officials say that an Israeli plane did not land in Islamabad, they
were technically right: it was an Isle of Man plane that left Tel Aviv and
stopped in Amman and landed in Rawalpindi. But why?
Point scoring?
The flight
comes against the backdrop of other surprising Israeli visits in recent weeks.
Along with Netanyahu’s trip to Oman, Israeli ministers also visited the United
Arab Emirates last month.
Former US
ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, told MEE that the mysterious flight should be
seen in this light.
“Israel
recently has made it clear it seeks to expand its relations with Arab and
Muslim countries including those it does not have formal diplomatic relations,”
he said.
Pakistan and
Israel, he said, have quite a bit in common. Both have had to redress their
relationship with the US many times over the years, and both face security
challenges from militant organisations.
“As
Saudi-Israel relations thaw, Pakistan could be influenced,” he added. “In
quieter terms, there could be ties.”
However,
Shapiro stressed that this would not be an easy task, as a result of Israel’s
close relations with neighbouring India with which Pakistan has long had
tensions, fighting three major wars against one another since winning
independence from Britain in 1947.
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Pakistan has
also faced increasing tensions with Washington both over its support for the
Taliban in Afghanistan and its close relations with China in the face of
Beijing-Washington trade wars.
In January, US
President Donald Trump’s administration announced that it would suspend US
military aid to Pakistan. At the time, Trump tweeted: “The United States has
foolishly given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid over the last 15 years,
and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit.”
Then, in
September, the US announced it had cancelled $300m of aid that had already been
suspended.
The aid cuts
come as Pakistan faces economic challenges after its foreign exchange reserves
plummeted, leaving the country in a serious debt crisis.
Last month,
newly elected Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan told MEE that
his country was in such desperate financial straits that he was forced to
attend the Future Investment Initiative, a financial summit in Saudi Arabia
that many Western officials and companies boycotted over the murder of Saudi
journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
He ended
up securing $6bn in
funding there.
“The reason I feel I have to avail myself of
this opportunity [to speak to the Saudi leadership] is because in a country of
210 million people right now we have the worst debt crisis in our
history," Khan told MEE several days earlier.
“Unless we get
loans from friendly countries or the IMF [the International Monetary Fund] we
actually won’t have in another two or three months enough foreign exchange to
service our debts or to pay for our imports. So we’re desperate at the moment.”
The US has the
largest share of votes at the IMF.
So the plane,
said analysts, should also be seen as part of the cash-strapped country’s
move away from ideological posturing towards strategic positioning in order to
generate revenue, and outreach to Israel is one action Pakistan could take to
ingratiate itself to the US.
Ayesha Siddiqa, a
Pakistan military expert at SOAS’ South Asia Institute, said: “I think the
military is desperate to acquire some money, they are at a point where they
will welcome anything that brings them cash."
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