Conflicts & War

Pakistan’s prime minister blames India for Karachi stock exchange attack

Islamabad Jun 30 (EFE).- Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan on Tuesday alleged that India was behind an attack on the Karachi stock exchange in which 3 security personnel and all 4 attackers were killed a day earlier.

“We have no doubt it is done by India. They wanted to create an atmosphere of instability and uncertainty in the country,” Khan said in a speech in the National Assembly, the lower house of the Pakistani parliament.

He claimed that the militants wanted to carry out an incident similar to the 2018-Mumbai attacks, in which 10 terrorists had attacked different targets in India’s main economic hub and four of them had laid siege to a luxury hotel for three days.

The United States and India had blamed Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba for the Mumbai attacks, in which 166 people were killed.

Khan said that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies had been on high alert for two months and had prevented four terror attacks, two of them close to Islamabad.

On Monday Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi had already accused India of helping terrorists’ sleeper cells, which were later activated in Pakistan.

The Indian government rejected the allegations, calling them “absurd.”

The attack began on Monday morning soon after the exchange opened for trading, as four gunmen threw grenades towards the building’s entrance before firing from their guns as they tried to enter the complex.

Security forces acted quickly to gun down all the assailants within eight minutes.

One police officer and two security guards were killed in the attack, while seven people were injured.

The Baloch Liberation Army, which seeks independence for the southwestern province of Balochistan, claimed responsibility for the attack.

The province is one of the most restive regions in Pakistan with the presence of several armed separatist groups, factions of the Taliban and Islamist militants.

India and Pakistan have been involved in three wars – two of them over the disputed Kashmir region – and several minor conflicts since their independence from the British rule in 1947. EFE

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