India Rips Pakistan’s Allegation Dishonouring Victims’ Memory
United Nations: India has denounced Pakistan’s “preposterous” attempt to exploit and dishonour the memory of the innocent victims of the 2014 Peshawar school massacre by making false allegations against New Delhi. “The despicable insinuation made by the Foreign Minister of Pakistan (Shah Mahmood Qureshi) dishonors the memory of the innocent lives lost to terrorists that day,” Eenam Gambhir, an Indian diplomat, told the General Assembly on Saturday denouncing Qureshi’s claim that India was behind the attack that was carried out by the Pakistan Taliban.
“It is a desperate attempt to look away from the monster of terror that Pakistan itself has created in its quest to destabilise neighbours and covet their territory,” she said while exercising the right of reply to his speech. “Let me recollect for the new government of Pakistan the outpouring of sorrow and pain in India that followed the massacre of innocent children in 2014.
“Both houses of India’s Parliament had expressed solidarity while paying respect to the memory of those killed (and) schools all over India had observed two minutes of silence in their memory,” the counsellor in India’s UN mission said. Qureshi spoke at the General Assembly after India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had delivered a scathing attack on Islamabad for promoting terrorism in the region and warning the world of a conflagration if it did not act against the sponsors and protectors of terrorists. He tried to portray Pakistan as a victim of terrorism and made the claim about the Peshawar incident. He also dragged in Kulbhushan Jadhav, an Indian that Pakistan’s military courts have in violation of accepted legal norms sentenced to death on spying charges.
Saeed is the mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attack by the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) that killed 164 people, the 2006 Mumbai train bombings and the 2001 attack on Indian Parliament. He is the co-founder of the LeT and the chief of Jama’at-ud-Da’wah (JuD) and an internationally designated terrorist with a US bounty or $10 million. India had canceled the proposed talks between Qureshi and Swaraj in New York after three Indian security personnel were killed by terrorists.
Gambhir also took issue with Qureshi citing the report on Kashmir presented by Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Let me make it clear to the new government of Pakistan that the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir is and will remain an integral part of India,” she declared. (IANS)
