By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s national cybercrime agency has ordered the sister of imprisoned former prime minister Imran Khan to appear before investigators on Monday, after a video of her alleging that last year’s brief military conflict with India was staged went viral across the country’s social media.
The National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency told Noreen Niazi in a notice dated on Saturday that she is accused of spreading “false, offensive and inflammatory” content intended to defame state institutions and circulate what the agency called fake narratives. She has been directed to appear in person Monday at the agency’s office in Islamabad’s G-13/3 sector to answer for the remarks, which surfaced in a widely circulated clip from a recent interview.
The agency’s notice does not identify the specific posts or statements it is investigating. But it landed one day after a clip of Niazi began spreading online in which she claimed the four-day conflict between the two nuclear-armed neighbours last year had been “orchestrated” in coordination with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in service of an unstated goal: pressuring Pakistan to recognise Israel.
“Modi could have fixed them in two minutes if he had wanted to,” Niazi said in the interview, according to accounts of the clip. “Why did Modi stop? What was he afraid of? India is such a large country. Look at that country and then look at yourselves.”
Niazi alleged that Israel was “behind” the developments, and suggested Pakistan was being steered toward the kind of formal diplomatic recognition of Israel that other countries extended under the Abraham Accords, the set of normalization agreements brokered during President Trump’s first term. She also connected Trump’s public praise for Pakistan’s military leadership to what she described as pressure from Washington to move toward recognition.
The notice warns Niazi that if she fails to appear, investigators “will be assumed” that she has nothing to offer in her defense, and that noncompliance is punishable under a section of Pakistan’s penal code governing failure to attend an official proceeding.
The episode has reopened a rift that has simmered since Khan’s ouster as prime minister in a 2022 parliamentary no-confidence vote — one Khan has long insisted was orchestrated by the military with Washington’s blessing, an accusation the armed forces have denied. Khan, who founded the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, has been held at Adiala Jail outside Rawalpindi since August 2023, facing a string of convictions that he and his party describe as an effort to sideline him politically. The government maintains the cases against him have followed due process.
The conflict at the center of Niazi’s remarks began in the days after an April 2025 militant attack on tourists in Indian-occupied Kashmir’s Pahalgam region, which India blamed on Pakistan-based militants without giving any evidence. The confrontation escalated into missile and drone strikes before a ceasefire took hold in early May, following a Pakistani military operation officials called Bunyan-um-Marsoos. Pakistani officials have since referred to the episode as Marka-e-Haq, an Arabic phrase meaning, roughly, the battle of truth, and have held it up as a defining moment of military success.
Officials respond swiftly
Word of the summons drew a rapid and pointed response from senior figures in Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government.
Information Minister Attaullah Tarar, addressing a gathering in Lahore, said Niazi’s remarks amounted to an attempt to prop up Khan’s flagging political standing, telling the crowd that Khan’s party had shown no real concern for ordinary citizens while Sharif and Punjab’s chief minister, Maryam Nawaz, had focused their efforts on serving the people of Lahore. Tarar said his party’s political fortunes were sinking, prompting its leadership to reach for statements meant to tarnish Pakistan’s image abroad. He called on Niazi to apologize, both to the country and to the families of soldiers killed defending it, and described the trend of remarks he characterized as disrespectful toward the military’s fallen as a troubling new pattern — one, he said, that plays directly into the hands of Indian media coverage.
Talal Chaudhry, the minister of state for interior, rejected any suggestion that Niazi’s comments had been an offhand slip. “This was not a slip of the tongue,” he said. “It was a deliberate statement, made after thought and consideration.” He went on to link Khan’s foreign funding case — a long-running legal matter over the party’s financing that has dogged Khan for years — to what he described as broader foreign influence over the family, extending the allegation to Khan’s marriage and the upbringing of his children. He alleged, without offering evidence, that opinion pieces favorable to Khan had run in Israeli and other international publications written by people close to Israel, which he characterized as a form of lobbying on the party’s behalf. “Their target is not just the Army,” Talal said. “Their target is not just Pakistan’s institutions. Their target is Pakistan itself.”
Parliamentary Affairs Minister Tariq Fazal Chaudhry also condemned the remarks, calling Pakistan’s armed forces “a sign of Pakistan’s prestige” and arguing that Khan’s family had repeatedly demonstrated hostility toward the country. He argued that the outcome of last year’s conflict had been recognized as a Pakistani victory not just domestically but by international military analysts, and noted that Trump has referred on multiple occasions to Indian aircraft downed during the fighting — though Trump has not specified in his public remarks which side’s aircraft were shot down, nor has the claim been independently verified. Tariq said Niazi’s suggestion that Modi could have “fixed” Pakistan’s military was “deeply shameful” and incompatible with the country’s national interest.
Copyright © 2021 Independent Pakistan | All rights reserved
