The allegation by a top US military officer that Pakistan’s government sanctioned the killing of a journalist who wrote about the country’s powerful security establishment was “extremely irresponsible,” the Pakistani state-run news agency said.
The verbal sparring over the death of Saleem Shahzad has added even more strain to US--Pakistani relations, which have teetered badly since the US raid that killed late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on May 2 in a northwest Pakistani army town.
Shahzad’s tortured body was found in late May after he had told friends he had been threatened by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, a spy unit that is notorious for harassing reporters in a country considered one of the deadliest in the world for journalists.
The ISI has denied it had anything to do with killing Shahzad, but the suspicions have persisted and prompted unusual levels of public criticism of the spy agency. Shahzad’s death also added to the pressure on the Pakistani military since the unilateral US raid against the al-Qaeda chief, which left it humiliated.
On Thursday, US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen said he believed the Pakistani government “sanctioned” Shahzad’s killing. Although Mullen said he could not directly tie the killing to the ISI, he was the first US official to make such a public allegation.
Mullen further said that the reported abuse of other journalists in Pakistan was not a good road for the government in Islamabad.
“It’s a way to continue to, quite frankly, spiral in the wrong direction,” said Mullen, who has devoted enormous time in the last four years to trying to improve relations with Pakistani leaders.
The state-run Associated Press of Pakistan issued a statement hours later in which an unnamed government spokesman called Mullen’s allegations “extremely irresponsible” and said that it “will not help in investigating the issue.”
The news agency, which acts as a government mouthpiece, often does not name the officials it quotes in reports.
The spokesman further said that the Pakistani government has created a commission to investigate Shahzad’s death and urged anyone who has anything to share on the subject at the “national or international level” to do so with the panel.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS