By: Lakshmi PS
Pakistan’s military is conducting court-martial proceedings against two senior officers on charges of espionage, a spokesman said on Friday, without giving details.
“Army Chief has ordered their court martial,” Major General Asif Ghafoor, the military’s main spokesman, told a news conference, adding that the two were individual cases.
He gave no details on the identity or rank of the officers nor what country or organization they were alleged to be spying for, but said: “There is no network as such.”
The news comes as tensions with neighbouring India have escalated sharply following a suicide attack on a police convoy in Indian-administered Kashmir that killed 40 members of a paramilitary police unit.
Separately, Ghafoor also said a former head of Pakistan’s spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Gen. Asad Durrani, was found guilty of violating the military’s code of conduct.
Durrani was facing an army’s inquiry for co-authoring a book with A. S. Dulat, a former chief of arch-rival India’s spy agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).
“Spy Chronicles”, published last summer, stirred controversy on a range of issues, notably the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad in 2011.
Durrani has been stripped of his pension and other benefits as a retired officer, Ghafoor said.
(Reuters)
