France's Ambassador to India, Alexandre Ziegler, has shot down a media report that French fighter jet manufacturer Dassault has not trained Pakistani Air Force pilots in the Rafale. He termed the report as 'fake news', in a bid to put out the controversy that the report had caused.
Ziegler tweeted in response to the controversy with brevity, saying, "I can confirm that it is fake news."
Ziegler's clarification came in response to an article carried by AIN, an American magazine focussed on the aviation sector. The article was not focussed on the training of the Pakistani pilots per se, but was a general report on the handover of the Rafale omnirole fighter jets to Qatar. The mention of Pakistani pilots was incidental to the intent of the report.
The AIN report was published on February 13, but sparked a controversy among Indian social media users on Wednesday. Social media commentators raised questions over whether the training given to the Pakistani pilots would render the Rafale ineffective in a hypothetical conflict between India and Pakistan.
Some social media users also tagged the French ambassador's social media profiles, to which he responded on Thursday morning.
The first Rafale fighter were handed over to the Qatar Air Force at a ceremony at Dassault Aviation's facility in Merignac, which is outside the city of Bordeaux in southwestern France. This was the first delivery of the Qatari order of 36 Rafale fighters. The variant that the Qatar Air Force will be getting is the Rafale DQ, which features avionics and systems that were specifically integrated on Qatar's request.
The Rafale DQ is presumably different from the India-specific configuration that the Centre has said needs to be kept secret.
Pakistani military officers are routinely posted on secondment with the militaries of a number of West Asian countries as part of their military cooperation and exchange programmes. The AIN report had said the first batch of pilots trained for the Qatar Air Force were in fact Pakistani exchange officers.
