India says all 6 militants killed in air base siege

In a phone call to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Sharif said that Pakistan was following up on leads provided by India’s government after an assault that began on Saturday at Pathankot base in northern Punjab state, near the border with Pakistan.

In the first apparent claim of responsibility, the United Jehad Council, an alliance of 13 Kashmir-based rebel groups, claimed its “highway squad” stormed the base.

Parrikar did not explain how just a handful of gunmen managed to paralyze a large Indian air base for nearly four days, insisting that security forces had done “a commendable job”.

The combat operation ended on Tuesday with Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar announcing that six terrorists were killed.

Operations to secure the area were continuing and were likely to take a long time, he said.

But analyst Khadim Hussain said the attack on the air base along with a Taliban surge in Afghanistan indicated that elements of the Pakistani military were not on board with the negotiations.

However, official sources on Monday said that the Indian government was mulling its options with regard to the Islamabad meeting.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will have to act following his government’s statement that it was working on leads provided by New Delhi in the wake of the Saturday attack on the IAF base at Pathankot, The Nation said.

There have been fears that militant groups might attempt to sabotage efforts to normalise ties between India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed rivals which have fought three wars since gaining independence from Britain in 1947.

“We can not inform whether there are more militants or not”, said Manish Mehta, an Indian army spokesman.

“Gen Raheel Sharif, the army’s boss, got a warm embrace from the Pentagon last fall-despite the ISI support for the Afghan Taliban’s offensive against the Kabul government and despite the Pakistani military’s backing of terror groups like JeM”, he said. “That was a little over a year ago, I believe“, he said, referring to horrific Taliban attack on a Peshawar school.

After an intelligence alert about an imminent terrorist threat to the base, New Delhi sent commandos to Pathankot on Friday.

Terrorists, who attacked Pathankot airbase, wanted to blow up the entire station. The foreign secretaries of the two countries are scheduled to meet in Islamabad in the mid of this month to set out schedules of the talks at various levels. India accused Pakistan of arming and training the insurgents, which Pakistan denies.

“I am very, very clear that they (our officers) should not take any risk”, he said, recalling how a National Security Guard (NSG) officer lost his life earlier while trying to reportedly shift a similar body.

The Sena also said that had the Congress been in power today, there would have been demands to strike at Pakistan and avenge the deaths of soldiers, but now nothing is being done about the incident.