"False And Malicious"; India Slams Report On Targeted Pakistan Assassination By The Guardian

The Foreign Ministry of India has denied allegations in a report by The Guardian which accuses India of practicing targeted killing in Pakistan to eliminate terrorists. The foreign ministry called it “false and malicious anti-India propaganda”. It also quoted Foreign Minister S Jaishankar who said targeted killing of other country’s people were not the Indian government’s policy.

The denial from foreign ministry was reported in The Guardian, which claimed that India has implemented a policy of targeting those it considers hostile to India”. The Guardian claims that over 20 such assassinations were carried out by the RAW, Indian Intelligence agency since the Pulwama attack of 2019, and mentions that the claims are based on evidence supplied by Pakistan and interviews with intelligence officials from both India and Pakistan.

Quoting an unnamed Indian official, the report says that India had drawn inspiration from Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency and KGB of Russia, that have been linked with extrajudicial killing of Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

According The Guardian report, the Pakistani authorities have produced documents about some of the killings, that could not be verified independently. It is also said that the Pakistani officials said that the killings were orchestrated by the sleeper cells of Indian intelligence established in UAE.

Earlier, US and Canada also accused India of involvement in assassination attempts in foreign soil. Last year, Canada accused Indian officials are involved in the killing of its citizen and Khalistani separatist Hardeep Singh Najjar. Canada called it a “credible allegations”, while India rejected the allegations calling it “absurd”. US also claimed that they had foiled an attempt to kill another Khalistani separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.

Washington claimed that the American-Canadian citizen Pannun was the subject of an assassination bid orchestrated by Nikil Gupta, an Indian national, and unnamed government official. Amid the allegations, India said it is examining US inputs on “nexus between organized criminals, gun runners, terrorists and others”.

Arindam Bagchi, former foreign ministry spokesperson said that “India takes such inputs seriously since it impinges on our own national security interests as well. Issues in the context of US inputs are already being examined by relevant departments”, as quoted by NDTV.

Later, India reported US that the its investigations has found involvement of a rogue official, as reported by Bloomberg. The report quoted an unnamed intelligence office and added that the person no longer works for the agency.