Dispute growing in Pakistan over authenticity of source document of US media report on diplomatic cable

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller during a recent briefing has piqued interest in the question of the purported leak's provenance. US-based news outlet The Intercept, which earlier this week reproduced what it claimed was the cipher in question, said in its report that the document was provided to it by «an anonymous source in the Pakistani military who said that they had no ties to Imran Khan or Khan's party».

However, many people — mostly Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party chief Imran Khan's critics — insist that the leak could only have come from the PTI. Khan, 70, is currently serving a three-year jail term after he was sentenced by a court in a corruption case last week.

The purported cipher (secret diplomatic cable) contained an account of a meeting between US State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu, and Pakistani envoy Asad Majeed Khan last year. Even the outgoing foreign minister, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, believes that the document published by The Intercept was «inauthentic».

Pointing to the timing of the purported leak, he told the Dawn newspaper that the military did not even have access to the diplomatic cable. The Foreign Office follows a «very strict protocol» and shares such cables only with the prime minister, the foreign minister, the head of the country's spy agency, and a few others, Bhutto-Zardari said, adding that all cables are then returned to the Foreign Office.