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INDIA-PAKISTAN-US-CONFLICT
India didn’t shoot down Pakistani F-16: report
NEW DELHI, April 5, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – A US magazine cast serious doubt
Friday on India’s assertion that it shot down a Pakistani F-16 fighter jet
during the two nuclear-armed countries’ latest bust-up in February.
Citing two unnamed senior US defense officials, Foreign Policy said that
US personnel recently conducted a count of Pakistan’s F-16s and found none
missing.
This contradicts a statement from India’s Air Vice Marshal R.G.K Kapoor
that India downed a Pakistani F-16 in a dogfight over Kashmir on February 27.
Pakistan denied at the time that this was the case.
Foreign Policy quoted one of the officials as saying that Pakistan invited
the US to physically count its F-16 fleet.
Many agreements on the sale of US military hardware to third countries
include clauses allowing US officials to regularly inspect the equipment.
Some of the aircraft were not immediately available, so it took US
personnel several weeks to account for all of the jets, the official said.
But now the count has been completed, and “all aircraft were present and
accounted for,” the magazine quoted the official as saying.
India’s defence ministry declined to comment to AFP on the report.
Pakistani armed forces spokesman Asif Ghafoor tweeted that “truth always
prevails”.
“Time for India to speak truth about false claims & actual losses on their
side including the second aircraft shot down by Pakistan,” he said in a re-
tweet of the Foreign Policy article.
There are no official figures from Pakistan on how many F-16s it has but
reported estimates place the number between 70 and 80.
In the dogfight Pakistan had also said it shot down two Indian planes, but
India said that it lost only one aircraft.
Initially Pakistan said it had captured two Indian pilots but the military
later clarified it had just one pilot in custody, who was later released.
– ‘Terror camp’ –
The dogfight happened after Pakistani aircraft entered Indian airspace a
day after Indian aircraft carried out an airstrike on what it said was a
“terrorist training camp” in Pakistan.
That in turn was in response to a suicide bombing on February 14 in
Indian-administered Kashmir that killed 40 Indian troops and which was
claimed by a militant group based in Pakistan.
Doubt has also been cast over the success of India’s airstrike, which Amit
Shah, president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has claimed
killed 250.
Pakistan denied that there was any damage or casualties.
Independent reporting by multiple local and international outlets who
visited the site also found no evidence of a major terrorist training camp —
or of any infrastructure damage at all.
The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab said that open-source
satellite imagery indicated “only impacts in the wooded area, with no damage
being visible to the surrounding structures.”
But Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose standing has been bolstered by the
raids ahead of elections beginning on April 11, has stuck to his guns, while
hitting out at those questioning the success of the strike as unpatriotic.
In the next raids, “opposition parties raising these questions can be tied
under the jets… so that they can look at the targets,” thundered junior
foreign minister V.K Singh.
BSS/AFP/BZC/1915HRS