Pakistan alleges Indian involvement in killing of two citizens on its soil

Pakistan has accused neighbouring India's intelligence agency of involvement in the extrajudicial killings of its citizens, saying it had "credible evidence" linking two Indian agents to the assasinations of two Pakistanis in Pakistan last year. (Photo/AA)

"We have documentary, financial and forensic evidence of the involvement of the two Indian agents who masterminded these assassinations," Foreign Secretary Sajjad Qazi said on Thursday at a news conference in Islamabad.

He said the assassination of Pakistani nationals on Pakistani soil was a violation of the country's sovereignty and a breach of the UN Charter. "This violation of Pakistan sovereignty by India is completely unacceptable," he said.

The two men were killed in gun attacks inside mosques in separate cities in Pakistan.

Pakistan's bombshell allegations come months after both the United States and Canada accused Indian agents of links to assassination attempts on their soil.

"Clearly the Indian network of extrajudicial and extraterritorial killings has become a global phenomenon," Qazi said.

Indian denial

India denied the Pakistani allegation, calling it an "attempt at peddling false and malicious anti-India propaganda."

“As the world knows, Pakistan has long been the epicentre of terrorism, organised crime, and illegal transnational activities," Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said. "To blame others for its own misdeeds can neither be a justification nor a solution.”

Qazi said the Indian agents, whom he identified as Yogesh Kumar and Ashok Kumar, orchestrated the deaths of the two Pakistanis from a third country, adding the method of killings was similar to cases in Canada and US.

He said the killings involved "a sophisticated international setup spread over multiple jurisdictions. Indian agents used technology and safe havens on foreign soil to commit assassinations in Pakistan. They recruited, financed and supported criminals, terrorists and unsuspecting civilians to play defined roles in these assassinations."

In September, gunmen killed Mohammad Riaz inside a mosque in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

He was a former member of the group Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which was founded by Hafiz Saeed, who also founded the outlawed group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was blamed by New Delhi for attacks in Mumbai in 2008 that killed 166 people.

Qazi said the other Pakistani national, Shahid Latif, was killed in October inside a mosque in Pakistan's Sialkot district.

Latif was a close aide to Masood Azhar, the founder of the Jaish-e-Mohammad group, he said.

Indian agents accused in Canada, US murder plots

Last year, Canada accused Indian government of murdering a Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, sparking diplomatic tensions between both sides. Nijjar, a Sikh leader in the western Canadian province of British Columbia, was shot dead on June 18 in front of a Sikh temple in Surrey.

Nijjar supported creating a Sikh homeland in the form of an independent, so-called state of Khalistan in India's northern state of Punjab, the birthplace of the Sikh religion, which borders Pakistan. Nijjar was the fourth Sikh activist mysteriously killed in little over a year.

Last year, the US charged an Indian government official with plotting an assassination attempt against a prominent Sikh separatist leader, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, on US soil.

The government official was only described as "CC-1" in an indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court that charged Nikhil Gupta, 52, an Indian national who had lived in India, with murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire.

___

Source: TRT