New Delhi/Islamabad, Apr 6 (EFE).- India’s Defense Minister Rajnath Singh said on Friday that the Indian government is willing to enter Pakistan to kill terrorists who flee across the border after attempting to carry out terrorist activities in India.
“If he (the terrorist) flees to Pakistan, we will go there and kill him,” Singh said in an interview with local TV channel CNN News 18.
Singh’s made these remarks in response to a question about an investigation published by the British newspaper The Guardian on Thursday, which said that the Indian government had killed about 20 people in Pakistan since 2020, as part of a broader strategy to eliminate terrorists sheltered on foreign soil.
According to the British newspaper, based on documents and testimonies from Indian and Pakistani officials, the Indian intelligence agency allegedly began carrying out assassinations abroad as part of an “emboldened approach” to national security.
The agency is directly controlled by the office of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Pakistan’s government issued a statement on Saturday denouncing what it described as “provocative remarks” by the Indian defense minister.
“India’s assertion of its preparedness to extra-judicially execute more civilians, arbitrarily pronounced as ‘terrorists’, inside Pakistan constitutes a clear admission of culpability,” the Pakistani foreign ministry said.
“It is imperative for the international community to hold India accountable for its heinous and illegal actions,” it added.
The two nuclear powers experienced their worst military escalation in decades in 2019, when New Delhi claimed to have bombed a training camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist group in Pakistani territory in March of that year.
The group had claimed responsibility for a deadly attack in Indian-administered Kashmir in February 2019, in which 42 police officers died.
Relations between India and Pakistan have been tense since the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 into two countries by the British Empire mainly due to their dispute over the Kashmir region, over which they have fought two wars and had several minor conflicts. EFE
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