ISLAMABAD – France’s Ambassador to India, Alexandre Ziegler, has shot downa media report that French fighter jet manufacturer Dassault has nottrained Pakistani Air Force pilots in the Rafale.
He termed the report as ‘fake news’, in a bid to put out the controversythat the report had caused.
Ziegler tweeted in response to the controversy with brevity, saying, “I canconfirm that it is fake news.” link
s/111619123150linkTwitter Ads info and linkZiegler’s clarification came in response to an article carried by AIN, anAmerican magazine focussed on the aviation sector. The article was notfocussed on the training of the Pakistani pilots per se, but was a generalreport on the handover of the Rafale omnirole fighter jets to Qatar. Themention of Pakistani pilots was incidental to the intent of the report.link
The AIN report was published on February 13, but sparked a controversyamong Indian social media users on Wednesday. Social media commentatorsraised questions over whether the training given to the Pakistani pilotswould render the Rafale ineffective in a hypothetical conflict betweenIndia and Pakistan.
Some social media users also tagged the French ambassador’s social mediaprofiles, to which he responded on Thursday morning.
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The first Rafale fighter were handed over to the Qatar Air Force at aceremony at Dassault Aviation’s facility in Merignac, which is outside thecity of Bordeaux in southwestern France. This was the first delivery of theQatari order of 36 Rafale fighters. The variant that the Qatar Air Forcewill be getting is the Rafale DQ, which features avionics and systems thatwere specifically integrated on Qatar’s request.
The Rafale DQ is presumably different from the India-specific configurationthat the Centre has said needs to be kept secret.
Pakistani military officers are routinely posted on secondment with themilitaries of a number of West Asian countries as part of their militarycooperation and exchange programmes. The AIN report had said the firstbatch of pilots trained for the Qatar Air Force were in fact Pakistaniexchange officers.
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