Thursday, after a quieter night in cashmere, Lahore, the big Pakistani city border of India, woke up to the sound of explosions that resumed intermittently. India said it “neutralized” the air defense deployed there. new Delhi claims to have acted in response to a night attack of “Pakistani missiles and drones” which aimed at “military targets” on its soil.
“Ghost defense”
The Pakistani army, for its part, assured that it has “killed 28 of 29 Israeli manufacturing drones” sent by India in at least nine cities, some housing military or intelligence, such as Rawalpindi, the twin city of Islamabad.
The Pakistani Minister of Foreign Affairs Ishaq Dar assured that drones “tried to attack military sites”, and “targeted civilians”, killing one and injuring four soldiers.
“The Indian armed forces have targeted radars and air defense systems in several places in Pakistan,” said the Indian Defense Ministry, adding that Lahore’s installations had been “neutralized”.
Thursday in the evening, strong explosions, the origin of which was not immediately determined, rocked the airport in the city of Jammu, in the Indian cashmere, a security source told AFP.
After which Pakistan denied having launched strikes, the main military spokesperson qualifying the strikes of Indian “ghost defense” drones. The Pakistani army has denounced a “new act of aggression” of India carried out with “HAROP” Israeli manufacturing attacks, that is, suicide bomber.
“Very firm answer”
In Rawalpindi, near a perimeter closed by the security forces, Wajid Khan, a civil defense employee, encouraged the public to “not give in to panic and stay at home”.
In Karachi, the economic capital, the reference stock index dropped after the announcement of the drone attacks, resulting in a suspension of exchanges. Pakistani civil aviation has closed Karachi airport, which has to reopen at midnight.
At the same time, the Indian Minister of Foreign Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar assured his Iranian counterpart Abbas Arabhchi, who came as a mediator, that he was “not in (the) intention (of India) to cause a new escalation”. However, he added, any attack on Pakistan will arouse “a very firm answer”.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Thursday by phone with American diplomacy Marco Rubio, “firmly condemning the missile and drone strikes by India,” said his office. Marco Rubio said that “the United States was following the situation closely” and called on the two neighbors to “work together to defuse the situation”.
The American vice-president then also called for “de-escalation”, but by adding on the Fox News channel “we are not going to get involved in a war which is fundamentally not our business”.
