Indian officials have dismissed a media report that said the Indian government orchestrated killings of individuals in Pakistan as part of a bid to eliminate terrorists living on foreign soil.
Officials familiar with the developments told CNN-News18 that the article by British daily The Guardian is “false and fabricated”, and designed to malign the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They accused Pakistan’s notorious spy agency of carrying out the assassinations.
They stressed that when India says “we will eliminate terrorists by entering their homes”, it only refers to tensions in the border region and eliminating terrorists there who pose a threat to India’s sovereignty.
The Guardian, citing unnamed intelligence officials, mentioned almost 20 killings since 2020 which have been carried out by unknown gunmen in Pakistan. The report said the assassinations increased significantly in 2023. That year, seven terrorists – most wanted in India – were killed in Pakistan by unknown miscreants.
“This policy of Indian agents organising killings in Pakistan hasn’t been developed overnight. We believe they have worked for around two years to establish these sleeper cells in the UAE who are mostly organising the executions. After that, we began witnessing many killings,” a Pakistani official told The Guardian.
The report suggested India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) developed a sleeper cell in the UAE, and orchestrated the killings from there. In order to carry out the assassinations, the article said, Indian officials gave big amounts of money to poor Pakistanis — and, on occasions, got the job done by jihadists who were made to feel that they were killing “infidels”.
Analysts feel Pakistan has been reluctant to publicly acknowledge the killings as most of the targets are known terrorists and associates of banned militant groups that Islamabad has long denied sheltering, the report said.
Defence expert Sanjay Kulkarni told News18 that the Indian government does not operate in such ways. “These are false allegations. All these killings happened as part of a local gang war. These have nothing to do with the Indian government,” Kulkarni said.
“The Pakistan government has already said that the Baloch Liberation Front and local gangs are responsible,” he further added.
The Guardian also reported that India’s external affairs ministry rejected the allegations and said they were “false and malicious anti-India propaganda”. It highlighted a denial made by foreign minister S Jaishankar where he said that targeted killings in other countries were “not the government of India’s policy”.
Paramjit Singh Panjwar, the head of the Khalistan Commando Force (KCF), was killed in Lahore May last year. Zia-ur Rahman of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Mufti Qaiser Farooq, a close aide of LeT chief Hafiz Saeed were killed in September. JeM terrorist Shahid Latif who masterminded the 2016 attack on an Indian Air Force base in Pathankot was shot dead by unidentified assailants in a mosque in Daska town of Pakistan’s Sialkot in October.
One of the masterminds of the 2018 terrorist attack on an Indian Army camp in Jammu and Kashmir’s Sunjuwan that led to the death of five Indian Army soldiers, Khawaja Shahid, and LeT recruiter and commander Akram Khan Ghazi and JeM chief’s close aide Raheem Ullah Tariq were all killed in November.
The people who spoke to CNN-News18 said that the killings were conducted by the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) during restrictions placed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in order to get rid of terrorists.
“No one from the Indian security establishment is tasked with the job of killing another individual on the other side of the border in a civilian area. No such officer or agency is assigned the job. Pakistan is a terror state and they do such activities,” the people cited above said.
They also said that they follow diplomatic solutions. They also reiterated their demand that mob boss and terrorist Dawood Ibrahim should be handed over to India.
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