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Pakistan has threatened further retaliation after accusing India of targeting three of its military bases with missiles fired from fighter jets, in a major escalation of the brewing conflict between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.
“India, with its naked aggression, has attacked with missiles. Nur Khan base, Murid base and Shorkot base have been targeted,” Pakistan military spokesperson Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said in a live broadcast aired by state television early on Saturday.
Sharif said that most of the Indian missiles were intercepted by Pakistani air defences.
“Now you just wait for our response,” he warned India.
Nur Khan air base in Rawalpindi, where the military has its headquarters, is around 10km from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
Video shared on social media showed flames and smoke billowing into the night sky as a voice can be heard saying, “There has been an attack on Nur Khan base as fighter jets flew past.”
The attacks came hours after Indian said Pakistan had launched a fresh wave of drone strikes against India, and Pakistan alleged that India had fired ballistic missiles that fell in Indian territory.
“I want to give you the shocking news that India fired six ballistic missiles from Adampur. One of the ballistic missiles hit in Adampur, the rest of the five missiles hit in Indian Punjab area of Amritsar,” a spokesperson for the Pakistan army said in an unscheduled television broadcast at 1.50am local time.
Overnight, explosions were reported in the Indian cities of Amritsar, as well as Jammu and Srinagar in Indian Kashmir.
Earlier in the day, India accused Pakistan of launching an attack using up to 400 drones to target cities, military bases and places of worship across the north of the country on Thursday.
India claimed to have intercepted hundreds of Pakistani drones, which it said came across the border into Indian-administered Kashmir, as well as Rajasthan, Punjab and Gujarat. It said a first wave of drones came on Thursday evening and another wave hit close to dawn on Friday.
India said it had launched four drone strikes at Pakistan, directly targeting military defence infrastructure.
In a press conference on Friday, the Indian military alleged that Pakistan’s drone attacks on Thursday had targeted a gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, injuring a civilian, and that the drones had also targeted Christian churches.
“The targeting of temples, gurdwaras, convents is a new low by Pakistan,” said India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri.
Pakistan’s information minister, Attaullah Tarar, denied the drone attacks, calling the Indian army statement “baseless and misleading”, and said Pakistan had not undertaken any “offensive actions” within Indian Kashmir or beyond Pakistan’s border.
However, a Pakistan security official said that Thursday night’s drone strikes were just to “heat things up” before Pakistan launched a fully fledged retaliatory attack. “When we hit back, everyone will know,” they said.
Misri called Pakistan’s denial of the drone attacks “farcical” and “another example of its duplicity”.
The tit-for tat allegations were yet another alarming confrontation between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed countries, since India’s missile strikes on nine sites in Pakistan on Wednesday killed 31 people. Those strikes in turn were India’s response to an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir late last month, in which militants killed 25 Hindu tourists and a guide.
Pakistan said it considered the Indian attack an “act of war” and vowed to retaliate.
“We will not de-escalate – with the damages India did on our side, they should take a hit,” Pakistan’s military spokesperson, Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, said at a media briefing. “So far we have been protecting ourselves but they will get an answer in our own timing.”
The Pakistani army gave new details of Wednesday’s strike in which it claimed Pakistan had deployed more than 100 planes to ward off the strikes by Indian planes that carried out the attacks from Indian airspace. It said the two sides had engaged in an hour-long aerial dogfight.
Pakistan claimed it used Chinese-made weapons and ground air defences to help bring down five Indian fighter jets. India has yet to respond to allegations that Pakistan shot down its planes, but debris from at least three fighter jets, including that of at least one elite French Rafale jet, was seen in Indian-administered Kashmir and Punjab.
