Daily Times

The Foreign Office spokesperson Sunday trashed a news story appearing in ‘Klaxon’, an Australian news website, about China’s Wuhan Laboratory conducting alleged covert operations in Pakistan as ‘a politically motivated and fake story, composed of distortion of facts and fabrications that quote anonymous sources’.

In response to a media question about the Klaxon story, the spokesperson in a press release said that there is nothing secret about the Bio-Safety Level-3 (BSL-3) Laboratory of Pakistan referred to in the report. “Pakistan has been sharing information about the facility with the States Parties to the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention (BTWC) in its submission of Confidence Building Measures. The facility is meant for diagnostic and protective system improvement by Research and Development (R&D) on emerging health threats, surveillance and disease outbreak investigation,” it added.

The press release further said Pakistan strictly abides by its BTWC obligations and has been one of the most vocal supporters for a strong verification mechanism to ensure full compliance by the states parties to the convention. “The attempt to cast aspersions about the facility is particularly absurd against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has highlighted the need for better preparedness in the areas of disease surveillance and control and international collaborations in that regard, consistent with Article X of BTWC,” the spokesperson maintained.

The Embassy of China in Pakistan also strongly opposed the fabricated Klaxon’s story about China-Pakistan joint research on biological weapon. “It is totally irresponsible, vicious-intentioned to smear China and Sino-Pak relations. As a responsible nation, China always lives up to its obligations to BWC, (Biological Weapons Convention),” the Chinese embassy posted on its twitter account.

Earlier this week, a report titled ‘China’s Wuhan lab operating ‘covert operations’ in Pakistan, creating ‘anthrax-like’ pathogens’ in The Klaxon, an online magazine, had claimed China’s Wuhan lab has set up operations in Pakistan as part of a broader offensive against India and Western rivals. According to the report, the secret facility was allegedly making anthrax-like pathogens which could be used in biological warfare. The report while citing ‘highly credible intelligence sources’ had claimed the programme was being entirely funded by China.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology came under scrutiny in April with the US alleging that the coronavirus actually originated in the virology institute – located in China’s coronavirus epicentre – with a high-security biosafety laboratory.

Chinese scientists have said the virus likely jumped from an animal to humans in a market that sold wildlife. The director of the laboratory, Yuan Zhiming, had said that “there’s no way this virus came from us”. None of his staff had been infected, he told the English-language state broadcaster CGTN, adding the “whole institute is carrying out research in different areas related to the coronavirus”.