Pakistan rubbishes Indian infiltration claim
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has rejected as baseless Indian claims accusing Islamabad of attempting to infiltrate militants into occupied Kashmir via the Line of Control.
In a report earlier this week, the Press Trust of India, citing an unnamed security official, claimed that 140 fighters were waiting at launch pads to infiltrate into the disputed region.
"We categorically reject the baseless allegations that Pakistan wanted to infiltrate so-called 'terrorists' via the Line of Control (LoC)," Foreign Office spokesperson Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri said in a statement.
The spokesperson observed New Delhi's "smear campaign against Pakistan is well-known and was fully exposed" by EU DisinfoLab last year in its investigation titled Indian Chronicles.
In December, the Brussels-based NGO unearthed a 15-year-old operation run by an Indian entity that used hundreds of fake media outlets and the identity of a dead professor to target Pakistan.
The agency, in its report, deep dived into a 15-year operation targeting the body and United Nations to "discredit Pakistan internationally", termed this as the “largest network” of disinformation they have exposed so far.
Today, Chaudhri said, the occupied Kashmir remained "one of the most militarised zones in the world with over 900,000 Indian security personnel".
"India has erected [a] multi-tiered fence, installed electronic surveillance equipment and set up multiple layers of security, making it impossible for anything to cross the LoC to enter IIOJK," he said. "Therefore, such allegations recycled from time to time have no basis to stand on."
On the other hand, he said, New Delhi has been involved in sponsoring terrorism in the region against Pakistan and in other areas of the country, including the June blast in Johar Town neighbourhood in Lahore.
The spokesperson also recalled Pakistan in November last made public a dossier containing "irrefutable proofs" of the Indian sponsorship of terrorism in Pakistan.
In the dossier, the claims of Indian sponsorship of terrorism were backed by specific evidence of financing, training, harbouring, and weapons supply in the shape of copies of correspondence, bank transactions and communication intercepts.
Referring to the agreement between Pakistan and India in February, Chaudhri said it was done "in the interest of regional peace and security and to save Kashmiri lives".
The nuclear-armed neighbours signed a ceasefire agreement along the Line of Control in 2003, but the truce has frayed in recent years, and there have been mounting casualties among villagers living close to the de facto border.
But in February, the two militaries agreed to observe the ceasefire, having exchanged fire hundreds of times in recent months.
"India must not use baseless and misleading allegations of so-called 'infiltration' attempts as a handy ploy to find excuses to scuttle the ceasefire understanding," Chaudhri said.
"India must also refrain from peddling falsehoods and creating pretexts for false flag operations. Such irresponsible conduct would only result in further undermining peace and security in the region."
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