Pakistan on Tuesday strongly rejected the ‘officially inspired’ reports in Indian media seeking to link Pakistan with the terrorist attack on a Gurdawara in Kabul on March 25.
Spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs termed the reports a ‘highly mischievous and condemnable’ attempt by New Delhi, adding that the motivated reports have been patently designed to malign Pakistan. “India’s overall smear campaign against Pakistan is well-known. Seeking to implicate Pakistan in this terrorist attack is part of the desperate attempts India is making to divert attention from its own unacceptable actions and state terrorism in Indian-held Kashmir,” it said.
The Foreign Office said Pakistan has already condemned the dastardly terrorist attack on the Gurdawara in which so many precious lives were lost. “Places of worship are sacrosanct and their sanctity must be respected at all times. The perpetrators of this heinous crime must be brought to justice,” it said, and expressed the confidence that such Indian ploys will not succeed in misleading the world community. “As a country which has suffered the most from and fought resolutely against the scourge of terrorism, including state-sponsored terrorism emanating from across the border, Pakistan firmly believes that such despicable terrorist acts have no political, religious or moral justification,” it concluded.
Meanwhile, Pakistan on Tuesday welcomed the joint statement by six international human rights organizations calling on India to immediately release all arbitrarily detained prisoners and restore internet access in the occupied valley. In a tweet, Foreign Office Spokesperson Aisha Farooqui said the joint statement rightly underlines that measures to combat Covid-19 must respect human rights of every individual. “Urgent release of political prisoners, human rights defenders and all those arrested in Indian-held Kashmir after 5 August 2019 is therefore imperative,” she tweeted, adding that the statement underscores that allegations of torture against Kashmiri prisoners as part of a decades-long pattern of abuses have been repeatedly denounced by human rights and UN bodies.
