India Pakistan tensions: A total blackout was enforced in several parts of the border districts of Kutch and Banaskantha in Gujarat on Thursday amid escalating tension between India and Pakistan, officials said.
Both Kutch and Banaskantha districts share a border with Pakistan.
Officials confirmed that several parts of Kutch, including Bhuj, Nalia, Nakhatrana and Gandhidham towns, have been put under total blackout as a precautionary measure to deter any offensive gesture by Pakistan.
Similarly, blackouts have been declared in several villages in bordring Suigam taluka of Banaskantha district, they said.
Earlier during the day, wreckage of a ‘drone-like’ object was found at a remote place near Khavda village of Gujarat’s Kutch district, close to India’s border with Pakistan.
However, there was no clarity about the origin of the drone and whether it was shot down or got damaged and fell down after hitting the power line during early hours of Thursday.
The place where the wreckage was found is nearly 20 km away from the Indo-Pak border.
Tensions escalated after Indian armed forces early Wednesday carried out missile strikes on nine terror targets in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), including the Jaish-e-Mohammad stronghold of Bahawalpur and Lashkar-e-Taiba’s base in Muridke, in retaliation for the terror attack in Pahalgam.
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India Pakistan tensions: India foils Pak military’s attempts to engage targets in North, West
Indian Armed forces foiled attempts by the Pakistani military to engage a number of military targets in Northern and Western India using drones and missiles last night and destroyed a Pakistani air defence system in Lahore, officials said on Thursday. The Pakistani military attempted to target Awantipura, Srinagar, Jammu, Pathankot, Amritsar, Kapurthala, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Adampur, Bhatinda, Chandigarh, Nal, Phalodi, Uttarlai, and Bhuj, they said.
These were neutralised by the Integrated Counter Unmanned Aircraft System (Grid and Air Defence systems), the defence ministry said. “The debris of these attacks is now being recovered from a number of locations that prove the Pakistani attacks,” it said.
Countering the disinformation by Pakistan in wake of the recent tensions, India on Thursday said that the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22 was the original escalation. In the second briefing on the issue, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said that the Indian response was non-escalatory, precise, and measured.
“We are only responding to the original escalation,” he said. India has carried out a series of precision strikes on terror infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoK). The strikes were launched in the early hours of Wednesday as part of ‘Operation Sindoor’
