Acknowledgment, Then Denial: Pakistan's Flip-Flop On Jaish-e-Mohammed

Days after Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi admitted that the Jaish-e-Mohammed's chief is present in the country, its military has claimed the terror outfit which took responsibility for the Pulwama attack does not exist in Pakistan.

The suicide bomb attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama last month, which left 40 troopers of the Central Reserve Police Force dead, had dragged relations between India and Pakistan to their lowest point in years. After the attack, the Indian Air Force bombed a Jaish-e-Mohammed training facility in Pakistan's Balakot. In response, Islamabad sent warplanes to target Indian military installations in Jammu and Kashmir, leading to the first aerial encounter between the two countries in nearly 50 years.

Days later, in interviews to foreign news networks, Shah Mehmood Qureshi claimed the Jaish-e-Mohammed had not taken responsibility for the Pulwama attack and its chief Masood Azhar, wanted in India for a series of terror strikes including the 2008 Mumbai attacks, was "unwell". In one of the interviews to BBC he appeared to suggest the Pakistani establishment was in touch with the terrorist outfit too, before making a clumsy clarification.