Lucas de la Cal Correspondent in Asia

Asia correspondent

Updated Friday, February 2, 2024-09:27

The

Indian police

'arrest'

a pigeon suspected

of being the spy of a neighbor with whom

New Delhi

does not exactly get along, such as Pakistan or China. She holds the bird captive while she investigates the case. After a while, after not finding real evidence of this alleged espionage, the authorities claim that it was a false alarm and decide to release the pigeon.

This is what happened this week in

Bombay

, the financial capital of the most populous country. But, as surreal as it may seem, it is not an isolated anecdote. Indian police have detained several pigeons in the last decade because they believed they were spies working for the Chinese or Pakistanis.

Indian media reported on Friday that authorities had released into the wild a

"suspected Chinese spy pigeon"

that had been detained for eight months. She was captured in May in Bombay Harbor with two rings tied to her paws that had a message that appeared to be written in Chinese. Therefore, some agents took the bird and locked it in a cage at an animal clinic in the city.

Had

Beijing

sent a spy pigeon to the Asian neighbor with which it shares a huge disputed border in the Himalayas? Well no. It turns out that it was simply a bird from

Taiwan

that had escaped to India, where this type of news has not been the first time.

In 2015, police took away a pigeon that had

a "message stamped on its body"

written in Urdu, Pakistan's official language, containing a Pakistani phone number. A 14-year-old boy was the one who discovered it in a village in Manwal, about three kilometers from the border.

"They kept the bird in custody for alleged espionage," read the note published in local media, adding that the agents were checking to see if there was a spy camera, a transmitter or a hidden chip.

A couple of years earlier, Indian police found a dead falcon with a small camera on their territory. In 2016, another pigeon was detained after it was found carrying a warning note addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi near the country's heavily militarized border with Pakistan.

Border Security Force (BSF) officers

found the bird in Pathankot

, in the northern state of Punjab, where Pakistani soldiers launched a deadly attack on an Indian air force base in January of that year.

"Modi, we are not the same people of 1971. Now each and every child is ready to fight against India," said the note written in Urdu, referring to the last war fought by both countries.

In 2020, in Kashmir, police seized a pink-painted dove from a Pakistani fisherman that had a ring with several numbers engraved on its foot. They believed it carried a coded message.