Pak media gets egg on face after fake ‘WikiLeak’ cables

Leading Pakistani newspapers have acknowledged they were hoaxed after publishing reports based on fake WikiLeaks cables containing crude anti-India propaganda.

Several Pakistani newspapers had on Thursday reproduced an elaborate internet hoax based on purported diplomatic cables from the US embassy in India that spoke of alleged rifts between top Indian Army generals and a "Bosnia-like genocide" in Jammu and Kashmir.

The News claimed that cables released by WikiLeaks showed Indian spies were supporting Islamist militants in Pakistan's northwest tribal region of Waziristan and the south-western province of Baluchistan.

Datelined from Washington, the newspaper told how US diplomats thought of one Indian general as "incompetent" and ''geek", and of another as "self-obsessed, petulant and idiosyncratic" and "barely tolerated" by subordinates.

It likened another to late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic "with regard to butchering Muslims through war crimes" in Indian-held Kashmir.

But on Friday The News wrote that "on further inquiries, we learnt from our sources that the story was dubious and may have been planted."