New Delhi: Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar landed in controversy on Thursday after he quoted a fake article from the UK-based The Daily Telegraph to praise the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) during a Senate speech. “Telegraph writes Pakistan Air Force is the undisputed king of the skies,” Dar claimed on the floor of the Senate, citing what he believed was a British newspaper’s front-page coverage.
However, the quoted article turned out to be entirely fake. According to Dawn’s iVerify Pakistan fact-checking team, the viral image of The Telegraph’s front page circulating on social media is fake. The team analysed the viral screenshot and found no trace of such an article in The Daily Telegraph’s archives or website.
Fake Telegraph page exposed
The viral image raised suspicion due to its poor grammar and inconsistent formatting. Words like “Fyaw” instead of “Force,” “preformance” in place of “performance,” and “Aur Force” instead of “Air Force” were glaring indicators of fabrication. Other spelling errors like “advancemend” and disjointed sentence structures further confirmed the page’s inauthenticity.
Dawn’s investigation also noted that the page layout and typographical elements did not match the standard design of The Daily Telegraph. These inconsistencies, combined with the absence of any credible publication of such a headline, led to the conclusion that the image was AI-generated and part of a misinformation campaign.
Pak journalists flag fake image
Journalists in Pakistan, including The Nation’s Imran Mukhtar, criticised the spread of the fake image. “Earlier today, Deputy PM & Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar cited this false news… to support claims of PAF’s dominance over India,” Mukhtar posted. Another X user, Abdul Wasey Naik, confirmed, “This picture is AI-generated.”
The incident comes amid heightened tensions between India and Pakistan following India’s Operation Sindoor against terror camps in Pakistan. In response, Pakistani social media accounts, including state-linked ones, have ramped up a disinformation campaign—recycling old videos, mislabeling images, and fabricating news—to flood the information space with anti-India narratives.
