After a terror attack last Friday in Peshawar, some Pakistan lawmakers are perturbed by tweets from an Indian 'astrologer' who in October said that a terror attack in Pakistan was imminent, reported The Express Tribune.
What has upset these lawmakers,?even more, is that this self-proclaimed astrologer has predicted there will be five more "major terrorist attacks" in Pakistan by mid-February.
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These predictions by a man they believe is Indian, the lawmakers said, is proof that Indian intelligence is involved in terror attacks in Pakistan. What happened was that on October 13, a man called Anirudh Kumar Mishra - whose Twitter handle is @Anirudh_Astro - tweeted saying "terrorist attacks may happen in Pakistan in November." For good measure, this Mishra tagged Pakistani newspaper Dawn on this tweet as well.
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Mishra was off, by one day.
Last Friday, that is, on December 1, terrorists disguised in 'burqas' (full-face veil) attacked an agriculture training institute in Peshawar, killing 13 people and wounding more than 30.
After this attack, Mishra tweeted saying that his prediction was accurate, but he also acknowledged that he was off by one day. Then he said there would be five more such attacks in Pakistan by the middle of February.
A panel of senators in Pakistan yesterday asked the country's interior ministry how "an Indian national" could have made such a prediction that was by and large accurate. (To be sure, Pakistan has suffered 30-plus terror attacks already this year, of a total 120 major incidents of terrorism-related violence, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal.)
One Pakistani senator, A Rehman Malik, accused India of instigating acts of terrorism in Pakistan. India's intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), he alleged, was using Afghanistan's soil to plan terror acts.
Pakistan and its own intelligence agency seem to have a complicated relationship with astrologers and astronomers from India, which is probably why they feel Indian intelligence is involved despite there being no proof.
In fact, just last month, Pakistan's own intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), sent an information report to the country's earthquake-relief organisation predicting the likelihood of a high intensity earthquake in the Asian continental region.
This ISI report was tweeted by Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistan ambassador to the US, who ridiculed the notion of an intelligence agency taking up earthquake prediction.
Things took an even stranger turn when it emerged that Pakistan's ISI got its information from an extrasensory perception (ESP) organisation in Kerala. The organization is known for making "predictions" based on ESP and on the movement of planetary bodies and unusual rises in temperatures.
A member of the organisation called 'B.K. Research Association for E.S.P.' apparently talked about a quake in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. That letter, riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, was written by the company's director, one Babu Kalayil, and it issued "a warning for precaution" - whatever that means - to PM Modi.
According to a post on Kalayil's Facebook account, he has made similar predictions in the past about "Thunder sounds coming out of Saturn's Satellite" and "Smoke Layers flowing out from planet Jupiter."