Pakistan’s government has decided to present evidence of India’s alleged involvement in Balochistan at various international forums, Rana Sanaullah, political and public affairs adviser to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, has said. Speaking on Geo News’ “Naya Pakistan” program on Friday, he said the situation in Balochistan was not merely a political, law-and-order or terrorism problem but a “full-scale war” imposed by India using Afghanistan, the online edition of Geo News reported.
Sanaullah said a decision had been taken at the highest level to present specific evidence gathered against India to the international community. He claimed that Afghanistan was being deliberately used as a proxy to carry out attacks inside Pakistan. India has not commented, and Pakistan did not make the evidence public.
Meanwhile, Pakistani security sources claimed that 17 more “India-backed terrorists” were killed on Friday in the ongoing “Operation Shaban” in Balochistan, taking the operation’s death toll to 43. The operation began after a deadly attack on the Mangi Dam police station and involves the Pakistan Army, the Frontier Corps (FC) and the Balochistan Police.
At a news conference on Wednesday, the director general of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, said India-backed militants had attacked a police post but that police had resisted bravely, killing 15 attackers in the initial clash, in which nine police personnel also died. The attackers then took several police hostage before security forces arrived, he said. “Our sons were held hostage,” the military spokesman said, adding that security forces had carefully surrounded the militants in the hills of the Ziarat area, where they had been operating since July 6. When the militants realized they were surrounded, he said, “these cowards” killed 18 more police. In all, Lt Gen Chaudhry said, 27 police personnel were killed in the Mangi checkpost attack and 26 militants were killed in the operation.
Security sources said an attack on a police station in Khuzdar had also been repelled, and that eight more armed men were killed when the Pakistan Army and FC launched an operation there. Since July 5, they said, Operation Shaban and other intelligence-based operations had killed a total of 91 armed men, with a separate helicopter operation killing another five or six. While the operations had inflicted heavy losses on the armed groups, three recent attacks had killed 42 people in total, including security personnel and civilians.
At a meeting of the provincial apex committee on the National Action Plan in Quetta on Thursday, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif reaffirmed the civil and military leadership’s commitment to eliminating “India-backed terrorism” in Balochistan. “We must foil the evil designs of Fitna al-Khawarij. The whole nation stands with the armed forces,” he said, adding that the war would continue until the last terrorist in Pakistan was eliminated. In an apparent reference to India, Sharif said Pakistan’s “eastern neighbor” was behind the recent terrorist attacks, and alleged that Afghan territory was being used to attack Pakistan.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report