Indian forces still fighting gunmen at airforce base

Pakistan has condemned the attack and said it wanted to continue to build on the goodwill created by the impromptu meeting between Modi and Sharif last month.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Sunday met here with two former foreign secretaries and four former envoys to Pakistan as the government sought wider consultation over its policy towards Pakistan in the wake of the terror attack on the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot that claimed 13 lives, including those of seven Indian security personnel. Suspected militants infiltrated an Indian air force base near the border with P…

Ending a day full of tensions, security forces neutralized all four terrorists who had attacked Pathankot air force of India in Punjab on Saturday.

The number of troops killed in the attack rose to seven on Sunday, with four succumbing to their injuries overnight and an elite commando killed in a morning blast that occurred while he was handling explosives, officials said.

Official sources said one or two terrorists appeared to be still in the complex and were engaged in sniping at security forces who were trying to catch them alive if possible. READ ALSO: Pathankot strike plotted by Pakistan army headquarters?

An Indian army official said one of the dead was a lieutenant-colonel in the elite commando unit National Security Guard.

“The operation is going on at Air Force Station”, SHO Sukhjinder Singh told reporters.

They had earlier hijacked a police officer’s auto and driven it to the heavily guarded base – tactics used in earlier attacks believed to have been perpetrated by Pakistani-trained militants, Punjab’s police chief Suresh Arora told Reuters.

Two Jaish-e-Mohammed militants were suspected to have sneaked into the national capital.

The attack by gunmen disguised as soldiers came a week after Prime Minister Narendra Modi made an unscheduled visit to Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif in an effort to revive talks between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

India accuses Pakistan of arming and training Kashmir’s insurgents, a charge Islamabad denies, and the attack was viewed by many in India as an attempt to unravel recent progress in the country’s relationship with its archrival.

The responses to the weekend attack from both countries have been muted so far, with neither New Delhi nor Islamabad giving any indication that the planned talks are under any threat.

Even as the stage was being set for the foreign secretary-level meeting between the two sides came the Pathankot attack that is being deemed as an attack on the softening of ties between New Delhi and Islamabad.

However, Saturday’s pre-dawn attack was much more audacious in targeting a large military facility, from which India’s Russian-made fleet of MiG-21 fighter jets and Mi-35 attack helicopters fly.