A British investigation into allegations of money laundering by the Pakistani political party, the Muttahida Quami Movement, has led to potentially sensational disclosures – albeit ones that are for now based on a single Pakistani source speaking to the BBC. The British broadcaster on Wednesday filed an article saying an "authoritative Pakistani source" told them that officials in the MQM told UK authorities that their party received Indian funds.

"British authorities held formal recorded interviews with senior MQM officials who told them the party was receiving Indian funding, the BBC was told," the report said. "Meanwhile a Pakistani official has told the BBC that India has trained hundreds of MQM militants in explosives, weapons and sabotage over the last 10 years in camps in North and North East India."

Indian authorities have denied all claims, calling them "completely baseless", while the MQM has declined to comment. This is not the first time that the MQM, a party that primarily represents mohajirs, refugees who travelled over to Pakistan from India, has been connected with New Delhi. The allegations also come against the backdrop of the Pakistani authorities, the Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence attempting to crack down on MQM influence in Karachi, a city that was once run entirely by the party.

If the allegations manage to stick, they will end up tarring the party that has 24 members in the National Assembly. They could also result in more tensions between India and Pakistan, a few weeks after Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said that India would be willing to neutralise terrorists using other terrorists.

However, the sourcing of the BBC report is a bit convoluted. The article doesn't have any quotes or documents, and simply says that the information comes from a Pakistani official who was aware of what MQM officials said to Scotland Yard. It didn't come from the MQM officials themselves or even for that matter from any British authorities. That, plus the failure to acknowledge what the authorities in Pakistan have been trying to do to the MQM, prompted many Pakistanis themselves to question the veracity of the BBC account.




Of course, on the more nationalist side of the Twittersphere, plenty of Pakistanis took this as evidence of the problematic nature of the MQM as well as India's allegedly perfidious involvement in domestic politics. If proved to be true, this would allow Pakistan to claim some moral equivalence after decades of the world acknowledging that Islamabad is a perpetrator of state violence.

As was to be expected, Indians on Twitter also poured scorn on the flimsy sourcing of the report.