In
a puzzling turn of events, Indian authorities have arrested a pigeon on the suspicion
of spying for the Pakistani government. The dubious bird is believed to have
landed on the terrace of a barber’s home in the village of Manwal, four
kilometers away from the India-Pakistan border.
The
barber’s 14-year-old son noticed an Urdu message printed on its feathers that
read: ‘Tehsil Shakargarh, district Narowal’, along with a series of
numbers. The boy immediately turned the pigeon over to the police,
asking them to investigate its appearance.
Intrigued
by the message and by a wire-like object found on its body, officers rushed the
bird to a veterinary hospital in the town of Pathankot for inspection. X-Ray
reports did not reveal anything abnormal, but the police said that they plan to
detain the bird until they find out more. They do have a hunch that the digits
in the message may be a telephone number in Pakistan’s Narowal district and the
tension was further intensified by the fact that the bird made an
appearance during a top-secret inter-state security conference in India. So the
bird was listed in police records as a “suspected spy”.
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| The pigeon was discovered 2.48 miles from the Pakistani-Indian border in the village of Manwal |
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The bird was
X-rayed by police officers and has since been detained for further
investigation
|
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The bird was found
with a message in Urdu and a Pakistani telephone number stamped onto its body
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“This is a rare instance of a bird from
Pakistan being spotted here,” the police superintendent told the media. “We
have caught a few spies here. The area is sensitive, given its proximity to
Jammu, where infiltration is quite common.”
As bizarre as the case sounds, this isn’t
the first time a bird has been arrested. In 2008, Iranian authorities arrested
two pigeons for spying on a nuclear facility, and a stork was taken into custody
in Egypt a couple of years ago for having a mysterious device attached to its
feathers. Islamic State militants are reported to have captured at least a
dozen pigeon breeders in Iraq, earlier this year, to prevent being spied on by
their birds.
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