Pakistan claims India will carry out another attack on its soil in April

Pakistan has “reliable intelligence” that India will attack again this month, foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said on Sunday. The claim comes at a time when tensions over a February standoff between the two nuclear-armed neighbours had appeared to ease.

The attack could take place between 16 and 20 April, he said, adding that Pakistan had told the five permanent members of the UN Security Council of its concerns.

“We have reliable intelligence that India is planning a new attack on Pakistan. As per our information, this could take place between April 16 and 20,” Qureshi told reporters in his hometown of Multan. He did not elaborate on what evidence Pakistan had, or how he could be so specific with the timing, but he said Prime Minister Imran Khan had agreed to share the information with the country.

Later on Sunday evening, Pakistan summoned Indian deputy high commissioner Gaurav Ahluwalia to warn New Delhi against “any misadventure”, Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman Mohammad Faisal said in a Tweet.

Reacting to Qureshi’s comments, external affairs spokesman Raveesh Kumar, in a statement, said India rejected “the irresponsible and preposterous statement by the foreign minister of Pakistan with a clear objective of whipping up war hysteria in the region. This public gimmick appears to be a call to Pakistan-based terrorists to undertake a terror attack in India”.

“It has been made clear to Pakistan that it cannot absolve itself of responsibility of a cross border terrorist attack in India. No attempt at creating an alibi for its complicity in such attacks will succeed,” Kumar said demanding that Pakistan take “credible and irreversible steps against terrorism” rather than “making hysterical statements to obfuscate the core issue”. “India reserves the right to respond firmly and decisively to any cross border terrorist attack,” he added.

Tensions between India and Pakistan spiked after a suicide car bombing by a member of a Pakistan-based terrorist group, Jaish e- Mohammed (JeM), in Kashmir’s Pulwama killed 40 Indian paramilitary police personnel on 14 February.