Indian jets conducted air strikes against a militant camp in Pakistani territory on Tuesday, India’s foreign secretary said, and a Indian government source said 300 militants had been killed, but Pakistan denied there had been any casualties.
The air strikes hit a training camp of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), the group that claimed credit for a suicide car bomb attack killed at least 40 Indian paramilitary police in Kashmir on Feb. 14, ratcheting up tensions between the two nuclear armed neighbors.
The action was ordered as India said it had intelligence that Jaish was planning more attacks.
“In the face of imminent danger, a preemptive strike became absolutely necessary,” Vijay Gokhale, India’s top diplomat, told reporters.
“The existence of such training facilities, capable of training hundreds of jihadis could not have functioned without the knowledge of the Pakistani authorities,” Gokhale said.
Pakistan denies harboring JeM, a primarily anti-India group that forged ties with al Qaeda and has been on a UN terror list since 2001. In December 2001, Jaish fighters, along with members of another Pakistan-based militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, launched an attack on India’s parliament, which almost resulted in the two countries going to war for a fourth time.
Gokhale said “a very large number” of militants were killed in a strike on a training base in Balakot, a town in a remote valley in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, but did not provide a precise figure for the casualties.
The commander of the camp was Maulana Yusuf Azhar, a brother-in-law of JeM leader Masood Azhar, Gokhale said.
