US paper exposes India’s hand in target killings in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: The Washington Post has exposed India’s involvement in terrorism and target killings in Pakistan reporting that India’s intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) has carried out at least six target killings in Pakistan using hired criminals and Afghan shooters.

The RAW orchestrated a covert assassination campaign, fueling a wave of targeted killings in Pakistan, The Washington Post’s report said. The report added that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi having positioned himself as the most assertive Indian leader since independence, is the driving force behind the nation’s actions beyond its borders.

“Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has cast himself as tougher and more willing to take on India’s enemies than any other leader since Indian independence,” the report said.

The Washington Post examined six cases of target killings as planned in Pakistan through interviews with Pakistani and Indian officials, the militants’ allies and family members, and a review of police documents and other evidence collected by Pakistani investigators. In Pakistan, the killings were carried out by Pakistani petty criminals or Afghan hired guns, never Indian nationals, officials said.

To aid deniability, RAW officers employed businessmen in a Middle Eastern country as intermediaries and deployed separate, siloed teams to surveil targets, execute killings and funnel payments from dozens of informal, unregulated banking networks known as hawalas set up in multiple continents, according to Pakistani investigators.

The report said that Indian spy agency RAW executed plot to six killings in Pakistan since the year 2021. Allegedly planned by the RAW, six such killings were said to have similarities to alleged operations carried out to assassinate Khalistan separatists in the United States and Canada. Since last year, India’s relations with Western governments have been rocked by allegations that RAW officials also ordered the assassination of Sikh separatists in Canada and the United States — operations that appeared to be an outgrowth of a campaign first tested and refined in Pakistan, the report said.

It detailed the attack on Amir Sarfraz Tamba, the man who allegedly killed Indian prisoner Sarabjit Singh in Kot Lakhpat prison in 2013.

“The incident appeared to be the most recent example of what Pakistani officials call a striking development in the long-running strife between the two South Asian rivals.

In 2012, V K Singh, an Indian Army general who led a group that conducted small-scale bombings inside Pakistan, sought to assassinate the Kashmiri militant leader Syed Salahuddin in Pakistan, a former Indian official said. (Salahuddin remains alive.) One former Pakistani official said Pakistan believed India also played a role in the 2013 shooting outside an Islamabad bakery that killed Nasiruddin Haqqani, who had been suspected of bombing the Indian embassy in Kabul. But it was not until 2021, two years after Modi had won reelection while touting his tough-on Pakistan bona fides, that a spate of targeted killings began. That June, a Pakistani man hired by Indian intelligence detonated a car bomb outside the security perimeter of a Lahore compound that housed Hafiz Saeed, the Lashkar e-Taiba leader, but the blast failed to reach Saeed, according to Pakistani and Indian officials.

After that, the operations gained pace and precision. Instead of bombs, the RAW seemed to prefer pistol-wielding gunmen. Instead of top leaders, India pursued less guarded militants. Eight months after the blast targeting Saeed, assassins shot Zahoor Mistry, who had murdered an Indian passenger during the hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight in 1999.

Pakistani officials, citing confessions extracted from four suspects apprehended later, said the operation to kill Mistry was elaborate: A woman calling herself Tanaz Ansari, believed to be an alias for an Indian intelligence officer, recruited two Pakistanis to track Mistry, two Afghan nationals to shoot him and three people living in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East to funnel at least $5,500 to Pakistan to pay those involved. In the hours before the slaying, Ansari urged her Pakistani agent on the ground, Sheraz Ghulam Sarwar, to confirm Mistry’s identity and precise location. Sarwar bombarded Mistry with WhatsApp video calls, claiming to be a customer service agent from a ride-hailing app, according to screenshots from Mistry’s phone reviewed by The Post. Mistry rejected several video calls and replied, “I didn’t book any ride.” Minutes after that, Ansari messaged Mistry herself. Mistry rejected several video calls and replied, “I didn’t book any ride.”

Five days later, Ansari struck again, killing Syed Khalid Raza, a militant leader active in Kashmir in the 1990s, according to Pakistani officials. This time, they said, Ansari tapped Muhammad Ali Afridi, a Pakistani man she had first recruited in 2018 over Facebook, to track Raza’s routine for several days, purchase a pistol for two hit men and finally, bury the weapon in a riverbed after Raza was slain.

In tense WhatsApp exchanges that were obtained by Pakistani authorities after they apprehended Afridi and reviewed by The Post, Ansari agonised over whether it was risky for Afridi to approach a security guard in Raza’s building to ask about his whereabouts. But she demanded that Afridi send photos confirming Raza’s identity, saying she otherwise lacked “permission” from higher-ups to green light the operation and pay him. At one point, the two discussed another target Ansari was struggling to locate within the Defence Housing Authority neighborhood of Karachi.

Pakistani officials say they never ascertained Ansari’s real identity. (Neither Afridi, who is awaiting trial, nor Sarwar could be reached for comment.) But Raza’s murder, which was carried out in February 2023, seemed to foreshadow at least two operations that Western officials say were launched by Indian intelligence that spring.

The alleged mastermind of the 2016 Pathankot attack Shahid Latif was shot in the Pakistani district of Sialkot in October 2023 along with reports at the time saying that the killing was carried out by unknown assailants. The Washington Post report claimed that a group of men led by a labourer named Muhammad Umair had shot Latif. Later, it added, Umair was arrested. After previous such attempts failed, he was said to have admitted that he had been sent from abroad to kill Latif. Umair also allegedly disclosed the location of a safe house in that country, as per the newspaper.

Moreover, Pakistani agents later allegedly broke into the safe house, where they found intelligence, but did not find two Indians who were said to be the tenants. Their names are Ashok Kumar Anand Salian and Yogesh Kumar.

On the allegations, India’s foreign ministry declined to give a response to The Washington Post. Indian authorities have neither confirmed nor denied their role in specific assassinations in the past, however, stated that such killings were not part of official policy. These allegations came eight months after the RAW was also accused of being involved in an alleged plot to assassinate Khalistan separatist leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannun and in the killing of another Khalistan separatist leader known as Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

Earlier in April 2024, a report by The Guardian revealed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Indian government “ordered killings” on Pakistan’s soil. Exposing the “sophisticated and sinister” Indian campaign of extra-territorial and extra-judicial killings, Pakistan’s then-foreign secretary Syrus Qazi, in January 2024, said that Islamabad had “credible evidence” of Indian agents’ link to the killings of two of its citizens on its soil. In the report, the UK daily newspaper claimed that New Delhi “assassinated individuals in Pakistan”.

Diplomatic circles believe the world should note Indian aggression and violation of international laws.