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.