Pakistan’s security agencies have not found anything suspicious in Chetna Jadhav’s shoes that were confiscated by the Pakistani agencies when she went to Islamabad to meet her husband, Kulbhushan Jadhav, currently incarcerated there. The security agencies of Pakistan had said that they suspected that she was carrying a “metallic” device in one of her shoes.
Sources said that Pakistan’s agencies minutely examined her shoes, searching for spying devices. However, nothing could be found and Pakistan is now likely to attribute this “incident” to an over-enthusiastic security official who was present on the ground and on whose direction the shoes and other potentially “dangerous” items like mangal sutra, bangles, and the bindi of Chetna Jadhav and Jadhav’s mother were removed before they were allowed to meet Jadhav. These were confiscated on 25 December 2017.
Sources also said that, as was being speculated, Pakistan was unlikely to raise this issue in front of the International Court of Justice, which is hearing the Jadhav case. Jadhav has already been sentenced to death by a Pakistani court. Sources said that Pakistan did not have any evidence whatsoever to prove that India had used this “humane” opportunity to spy on Jadhav through his wife. “If it tries to do so, it will have to share the ‘evidence’ with the world, which will open it to more scrutiny. It will face the possibility of its so-called ‘evidence’ proving to be a dud and planted by its own agencies. Its case against Jadhav is just based on the confession of Jadhav, which we all know can be extracted very easily from a man who is in prison. Apart from that, Pakistan does not have any strong evidence to support its case that he was an Indian spy who was on a spying and sabotage mission. On the other hand, we have multiple confirmations that Jadhav was abducted from Iran’s Chabahar, and not Balochistan, by ISI supported smugglers and mercenaries, who then sold him to the Pakistani agency. The least Pakistan can do now is follow the laid down international practice when it comes to dealing with such bilateral issues,” a source said.
Sources said that the Pakistan Foreign Office was having a hard time dealing with the “concocted” tale of Jadhav’s wife carrying a spying device in her shoe, as it was not being able to answer the questions of local journalists who were asking about the nature of the “spying device” allegedly recovered and why details of the same were not being shared with them.
On 25 December, the spokesman at Pakistan’s Foreign Office, Islamabad had claimed that it had detected a “metallic substance” in the shoes of wife of Kulbhushan Jadhav when she went to meet him and that it had “provided an alternative pair of shoes after her shoes were removed. There was something in the shoe.”