India summons Basit, shows proof of Pakistan's hand in Uri attack

India on Wednesday confronted Pakistan with evidence that confirmed that the perpetrators of the terror attack at Uri had come from the neighbouring country.

Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar summoned Islamabad’s envoy to New Delhi, Abdul Basit, to his office at the South Block here. He shared with Basit the details of the items recovered from the corpses of the suicide attackers who carried out the strike on an Indian Army camp at Uri in northern Kashmir early on Sunday, in which 18 soldiers lost their lives.

The recovered items — GPS devices, grenades, communication equipment and matrix sheets, food, medicine and clothes — had Pakistani markings, which indicated that the terrorists had sneaked into India from Pakistan.

New Delhi also offered to share with Islamabad the fingerprints and DNA samples of the five terrorists killed by security forces in Poonch on September 11 as well as at Uri, if the Pakistan government “wishes to investigate” the “cross-border attacks”, Vikas Swarup, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson, said.    

Jaishankar also told Basit that the latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlined that the “infrastructure of terrorism” remained active in Pakistan.India shared the evidences with Pakistan even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a meeting with the Cabinet Committee on Security and discussed diplomatic and military options to respond to the Uri



attack on Sunday.

New Delhi had earlier offered to help Islamabad probe the January 2-5 attack on the Indian Air Force base at Pathankot in Punjab by a gang of terrorists from Pakistan. Islamabad had launched a probe into the attack on the IAF base and had even sent a team of investigators to New Delhi and Pathankot in April. But the findings of the probe or its progress are yet to be shared with New Delhi.

The foreign secretary on Wednesday conveyed to Islamabad’s envoy New Delhi’s concerns over continuous attempts by armed terrorists to cross the Line of Control and the undisputed stretch of the border to carry out attacks in India. He noted that 17 such attempts had been interdicted at or around the LoC, resulting in the elimination of 31 terrorists.    The foreign secretary also reminded him that even as he spoke, two separate encounters between the security forces and the terrorists were going on near the LoC, said Swarup.

Jaishankar summoned Basit just a few hours before Pakistan Prime Minister M Nawaz Sharif’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly. New Delhi will use External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s speech at the UN General Assembly on Monday to dismiss Pakistan’s accusations of India of violating human rights in Kashmir and to turn the tables on the government of the neighbouring country with allegations of repressions in its Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan areas.