India’s defence minister has appeared to confirm that the government carried out extrajudicial killings in neighbouring Pakistan, after a Guardian report on the alleged assassinations.
Intelligence officials from India and Pakistan who spoke to the Guardian had alleged that India’s foreign intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (Raw), had been involved in up to 20 killings of individuals in Pakistan since 2020, as part of a wider policy to target terrorists living on foreign soil.
Most of those targeted in Pakistan were convicted terrorists and militants known to be associated with Islamist militant groups that had carried out deadly attacks in India.
India has previously denied all involvement in the assassinations. But after the publication of the Guardian’s report, Rajnath Singh, the Indian defence minister, seemed to confirm that India did target terrorists hiding out in Pakistan.
“If any terrorist from a neighbouring country tries to disturb India or carry out terrorist activities here, he will be given a fitting reply. If he escapes to Pakistan we will go to Pakistan and kill him there,” Singh said in an interview to Indian TV news network News18 on Friday.
Singh said that India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, had made it clear this policy was “right” and that “India has the capability to do so. Pakistan has also started understanding this.”
Singh’s comments are the first time that India has acknowledged any assassinations by its operatives on foreign soil.
Modi, who is running for a third term as prime minister in elections that will begin in two weeks, also alluded to operations abroad in a campaign speech on Thursday, stating that “today’s India goes inside enemy territory to strike”.
Indian intelligence operatives told the Guardian that the alleged shift in policy to targeting terrorists in Pakistan came in 2019, after the Pulwama attack when militants from the Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 40 paramilitary personnel in Kashmir. Modi was in power at the time, running for a second term in office.
The Indian intelligence officials claimed that India had drawn inspiration from intelligence agencies such as the Mossad in Israel and from incidents such as the killing of the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul.
Officials from two separate Pakistani intelligence agencies showed the Guardian detailed evidence from investigations into seven of these killings allegedly carried out by Raw, but said they suspected India’s involvement in up to 20 deaths.
The documents appeared to show that several of the killings were orchestrated by Raw sleeper cells mostly operating out of the United Arab Emirates, where impoverished Pakistani workers were recruited and paid millions of rupees to carry out the assassinations.
In other cases, Raw operatives are alleged to have recruited aspiring jihadists through radical Islamist networks and told them they were carrying out “sacred killings” of “infidels”.
The Indian intelligence operatives also confirmed that Sikh activists living in western countries such as the US, UK and Canada, who were vocal advocates of the separatist Khalistan movement, had become a focus of Raw’s foreign operations after 2020.
India has been accused publicly by Washington and Ottawa of involvement in the murder of the Khalistani Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada and of a botched assassination attempt on another Sikh, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in the US last year. India has denied involvement in the killing of Nijjar and, according to reports, an internal investigation blamed the failed assassination attempt of Pannun on a “rogue agent”.
Pakistan’s foreign office also responded to the Guardian’s report. “These cases exposed the increasing sophistication and brazenness of Indian-sponsored terrorist acts inside Pakistan, with striking similarities to the pattern observed in other countries, including Canada and the United States,” it said.
