Pakistan’s prime minister praises military response to Indian jets

Muhamad Yehia.. Cairo

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Wednesday commended Pakistan’s armed forces for their response to an attempted overnight incursion by Indian fighter jets, claiming that five Indian aircraft were downed after they released their payloads.

In a speech to Parliament, Sharif said the Pakistan Air Force had been on high alert since India falsely tried to implicate Pakistan in the April 22 attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir.

He said that though he offered an international probe into the attack, New Delhi did not respond to the proposal.

Sharif also claimed that on the night of April 29, Indian Rafale jets took off in a combat formation, but Pakistan successfully jammed their communications.

“The enemy couldn’t even understand what had happened to them” and the Indian jets turned back, Sharif said.

India’s and Pakistan’s ownership of nuclear weapons has deepened international worries about the longstanding rivalry and hostility between the two neighbors. At a nuclear conference in Washington last month, Dame Louise Richardson, president of the Carnegie Corporation, a leading private supporter of nuclear security efforts, singled out the Pakistan-India nuclear threat as one of the gravest in the world.

While nuclear arms programs by the world’s leading economies get most of the attention, “if I were a betting person, I would say that the odds are of a first new nuclear detonation occurring in one of the other areas, say, India-Pakistan,” Richardson said then.