The Indian authorities assassinated people in Pakistan as a part of a wider technique to get rid of terrorists residing on international soil, in line with Indian and Pakistani intelligence operatives who spoke to the Guardian.

Interviews with intelligence officers in each international locations, in addition to paperwork shared by Pakistani investigators, shed new mild on how India’s international intelligence company allegedly started to hold out assassinations overseas as a part of an emboldened strategy to nationwide safety after 2019. The company, the Research & Analysis Wing (Raw), is instantly managed by the workplace of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, who’s operating for a 3rd time period in workplace in elections later this month.

The accounts seem to present additional weight to allegations that Delhi has applied a coverage of concentrating on these it considers hostile to India. While the brand new allegations discuss with people charged with critical and violent terror offences, India has additionally been accused publicly by Washington and Ottawa of involvement within the murders of dissident figures together with a Sikh activist in Canada and of a botched assassination try on one other Sikh within the US final yr.

The contemporary claims relate to virtually 20 killings since 2020, carried out by unknown gunmen in Pakistan. While India has beforehand been unofficially linked to the deaths, that is the primary time Indian intelligence personnel have mentioned the alleged operations in Pakistan, and detailed documentation has been seen alleging Raw’s direct involvement within the assassinations.

The allegations additionally counsel that Sikh separatists within the Khalistan motion had been focused as a part of these Indian international operations, each in Pakistan and the west.

According to Pakistani investigators, these deaths had been orchestrated by Indian intelligence sleeper-cells largely working out of the United Arab Emirates. The rise in killings in 2023 was credited to the elevated exercise of those cells, that are accused of paying hundreds of thousands of rupees to native criminals or poor Pakistanis to hold out the assassinations. Indian brokers additionally allegedly recruited jihadists to hold out the shootings, making them imagine they had been killing “infidels”.

According to 2 Indian intelligence officers, the spy company’s shift to specializing in dissidents overseas was triggered by the Pulwama attack in 2019, when a suicide bomber focused a navy convoy in Indian-administered Kashmir, killing 40 paramilitary personnel. The Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed duty.

Modi was operating for a second time period on the time and was introduced back to power within the aftermath of the assault.

“After Pulwama, the approach changed to target the elements outside the country before they are able to launch an attack or create any disturbance,” one Indian intelligence operative mentioned. “We could not stop the attacks because ultimately their safe havens were in Pakistan, so we had to get to the source.”

To conduct such operations “needed approval from the highest level of government”, he added.

The officer mentioned India had drawn inspiration from intelligence businesses equivalent to Israel’s the Mossad and Russia’s KGB, which have been linked to extrajudicial killings on international soil. He additionally mentioned the killing of the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in 2018 within the Saudi embassy, had been instantly cited by Raw officers.

“It was a few months after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi that there was a debate among the top brass of intelligence in the prime minister’s office about how something can be learned from the case. One senior officer said in a meeting that if Saudis can do this, why not us?” he recounted.

“What the Saudis did was very effective. You not only get rid of your enemy but send a chilling message, a warning to the people working against you. Every intelligence agency has been doing this. Our country cannot be strong without exerting power over our enemies.”

Senior officers from two separate Pakistani intelligence businesses mentioned they suspected India’s involvement in as much as 20 killings since 2020. They pointed to proof regarding beforehand undisclosed inquiries into seven of the circumstances – together with witness testimonies, arrest information, monetary statements, WhatsApp messages and passports – which investigators say showcase intimately the operations carried out by Indian spies to assassinate targets on Pakistani soil. The Guardian has seen the paperwork however they might not be independently verified.

The intelligence sources claimed that focused assassinations elevated considerably in 2023, accusing India of involvement within the suspected deaths of about 15 folks, most of whom had been shot at shut vary by unknown gunmen.

In a response to the Guardian, India’s ministry of exterior affairs denied all of the allegations, reiterating an earlier assertion that they had been “false and malicious anti-India propaganda”. The ministry emphasised a earlier denial made by India’s international minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, that focused killings in different international locations had been “not the government of India’s policy”.

In the killing of Zahid Akhund, an alias for the convicted Kashmiri terrorist Zahoor Mistry who was concerned within the lethal hijacking of an Air India flight, the Pakistani paperwork say a Raw handler allegedly paid for info on Akhund’s actions and site over a interval of months. She then allegedly contacted him instantly, pretending to be a journalist who needed to interview a terrorist, so as to verify his id.

“Are you Zahid? I am a journalist from the New York Post,” learn messages within the file proven to the Guardian. Zahid is claimed to have responded: “For what u r messaging me?”

Millions of rupees had been then allegedly paid to Afghan nationals to hold out the taking pictures in Karachi in March 2022. They fled over the border however their handlers had been later arrested by Pakistani safety businesses.

According to the proof gathered by Pakistan, the killings had been repeatedly coordinated out of the UAE, the place Raw established sleeper cells that may individually prepare completely different components of the operation and recruit the killers.

Investigators alleged that hundreds of thousands of rupees would typically be paid to criminals or impoverished locals to hold out the murders, with paperwork claiming that funds had been largely completed by way of Dubai. Meetings of Raw handlers overseeing the killings are additionally mentioned to have taken additionally place in Nepal, the Maldives and Mauritius.

“This policy of Indian agents organising killings in Pakistan hasn’t been developed overnight,” mentioned a Pakistani official. “We believe they have worked for around two years to establish these sleeper cells in the UAE who are mostly organising the executions. After that, we began witnessing many killings.”

In the case of Shahid Latif, the commander of Jaish-e-Mohammed and one in every of India’s most infamous militants, a number of makes an attempt had been allegedly made to kill him. In the top, the paperwork declare, it was an illiterate 20-year-old Pakistani who carried out the assassination in Pakistan in October, allegedly recruited by Raw within the UAE, the place he was working for a minimal wage in an Amazon packing warehouse.

Pakistani investigators discovered that the person had allegedly been paid 1.5m Pakistani rupees (£4,000) by an undercover Indian agent to trace down Latif and later was promised 15m Pakistani rupees and his personal catering firm within the UAE if he carried out the killing. The younger man shot Latif useless in a mosque in Sialkot however was arrested quickly after, together with accomplices.

The killings of Bashir Ahmad Peer, commander of the militant outfit Hizbul Mujahideen, and Saleem Rehmani, who was on India’s most-wanted checklist, had been additionally allegedly deliberate out of the UAE, with transaction receipts from Dubai showing to indicate funds of hundreds of thousands of rupees to the killers. Rehmani’s loss of life had beforehand been reported as the result of a suspected armed robbery.

Analysts imagine Pakistani authorities have been reluctant to publicly acknowledge the killings as a lot of the targets are recognized terrorists and associates of outlawed militant teams that Islamabad has lengthy denied sheltering.

In most circumstances, public details about their deaths has been scant. However, Pakistani businesses confirmed proof they’d carried out investigations and arrests behind closed doorways.

The figures given to the Guardian match up with these collated by analysts who’ve been monitoring unclaimed militant killings in Pakistan. Ajay Sahni, the manager director of the Institute for Conflict Management in Delhi, mentioned his organisation had documented 20 suspicious fatalities in Pakistan by unknown attackers since 2020, although two had been claimed by native militant teams. He emphasised that due to Pakistan’s refusal to publicly examine the circumstances – and even acknowledge that these people had been residing of their jurisdiction – “we have no way of knowing the cause”.

“If you look at the numbers, there is clearly a shift in intent by someone or other,” mentioned Sahni. “It would be in Pakistan’s interest to say this has been done by India. Equally, one of the legitimate lines of inquiry would be possible involvement of the Indian agencies.”

Pakistan’s international secretary, Muhammad Syrus Sajjad Qazi, publicly acknowledged two of the killings in a press convention in January, the place he accused India of carrying out a “sophisticated and sinister” marketing campaign of “extraterritorial and extrajudicial killings” in Pakistan.

Islamabad’s accusations had been met with scepticism by others, as a result of longstanding animosity between the 2 neighbouring international locations who’ve gone to struggle 4 instances and have typically made unsubstantiated accusations towards the opposite.

For many years India has accused Pakistan of bankrolling a violent militant insurgency within the disputed area of Indian-administered Kashmir and of giving a secure haven to terrorists. In the early 2000s, India was hit by successive terrorist assaults orchestrated by Pakistan-based Islamist militant teams, together with the 2006 Mumbai train blasts, which killed greater than 160 folks, and the 2008 Mumbai bombings, which killed 172 folks.

Both international locations are recognized to have carried out cross-border intelligence operations, together with small bomb blasts. However, analysts and Pakistani officers described the alleged systematic focused killings of dissidents by Indian brokers on Pakistani soil since 2020 as “new and unprecedented”.

The majority of these allegedly killed by Raw in Pakistan up to now three years have been people related to militant teams equivalent to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, and in a number of circumstances have convictions or confirmed hyperlinks to a few of India’s deadliest terrorist incidents, which have killed lots of of individuals. Others had been seen to be “handlers” of Kashmiri militants who helped coordinate assaults and unfold info from afar.

According to one of many Indian intelligence officers, the Pulwama assault in 2019 prompted fears that militant teams in Pakistan had been planning a repeat of assaults such because the 2008 Mumbai bombings.

“The previous approach had been to foil terrorist attacks,” he mentioned. “But while we were able to make significant progress in bringing the terrorist numbers down in Kashmir, the problem was the handlers in Pakistan. We could not just wait for another Mumbai or an attack on parliament when we are aware that the planners were still operating in Pakistan.”

In September, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, told parliament there have been “credible allegations” that Indian brokers had orchestrated the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a distinguished Sikh activist who was gunned down in Vancouver. Weeks later, the US Department of Justice released an indictment vividly detailing how an Indian agent had tried to recruit a hitman in New York to kill one other Sikh activist, later named as Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.

Both males had been main advocates of the Khalistan movement, which seeks to create an impartial Sikh state and is unlawful in India. India denied any involvement within the killing of Nijjar, whereas according to a recent report, India’s personal investigation into Pannun’s loss of life concluded that it had been carried out by a rogue agent who was not working for Raw.

According to 1 Indian intelligence official, Delhi just lately ordered the suspension of focused killings in Pakistan after Canada and the US went public with their allegations. No suspicious killings have taken place to this point this yr.

Two Indian operatives individually confirmed that diaspora Khalistani activists had develop into a spotlight of India’s international operations after lots of of hundreds of farmers, largely Sikhs from Punjab, descended on Delhi to protest towards new farm legal guidelines. The protest in the end compelled the federal government into a rare policy U-turn, which was seen as an embarrassment.

The suspicion in Delhi was that firebrand Sikh activists residing overseas, notably these in Canada, the US and the UK, had been fuelling the farmers’ protests and stirring up worldwide help by way of their sturdy international networks. It stoked fears that these activists may very well be a destabilising pressure and had been able to reviving Khalistani militancy in India.

“Places were raided and people were arrested in Punjab, but things were actually being controlled from places like Canada,” mentioned one of many Indian intelligence operatives. “Like other intelligence agencies, we had to deal with it.”

In the UK, Sikhs within the West Midlands had been issued “threat to life” warnings, amid rising concern concerning the security of separatist campaigners who Sikhs declare are being focused by the Indian authorities.

Before the US and Canadian circumstances, a high-profile Khalistani chief, Paramjit Singh Panjwar, was shot useless in Lahore final May. Pakistani investigators claimed they’d warned Panjwar that his life was at risk a month earlier than he was killed and mentioned one other Khalistani activist residing in Pakistan has additionally confronted threats to his life.

Panjwar’s assassination is amongst these alleged to have been carried out by Indian operatives utilizing what Pakistani businesses described because the “religious method”. According to the paperwork, Indian brokers used social media to infiltrate networks of Islamic State (IS) and models linked to the Taliban, the place they recruited and groomed Pakistani Islamist radicals to hold out hit jobs on Indian dissidents by telling them they had been finishing up “sacred killings” of “infidels”.

These brokers allegedly sought assist from former IS fighters from the Indian state of Kerala – who had travelled to Afghanistan to battle for IS however surrendered after 2019 and had been introduced again by way of diplomatic channels – to get entry to those jihadist networks.

According to an investigation by the Pakistani businesses, Panjwar’s killer, who was later caught, allegedly thought he was engaged on the directions of the Pakistan Taliban affiliate Badri 313 Battalion and needed to show himself by killing an enemy of Islam.

The killing of Riyaz Ahmed, a high Lashkar-e-Taiba commander, in September final yr was allegedly carried out by Raw in an analogous method. His killer, Pakistan believes, was recruited by way of a Telegram channel for many who needed to battle for IS, and which had been infiltrated by Raw brokers.

They have claimed the murderer was Muhammad Abdullah, a 20-year-old from Lahore. He allegedly advised Pakistani investigators he was promised he can be despatched to Afghanistan to battle for IS if he handed the check of killing an “infidel” in Pakistan, with Ahmed introduced because the goal. Abdullah shot and killed Ahmed throughout early morning prayers at a mosque in Rawalkot, however was later arrested by Pakistani authorities.

Walter Ladwig, a political scientist at King’s College London, mentioned the alleged shift in technique was in step with Modi’s extra aggressive strategy to international coverage and that simply as western states have been accused of extrajudicial killings overseas within the identify of nationwide safety, there have been these in Delhi who felt “India reserves the right to do the same”.

Daniel Markey, a senior adviser on south Asia on the United States Institute of Peace, mentioned: “In terms of India’s involvement, it all kind of adds up. It’s utterly consistent with this framing of India having arrived on the world stage. Being willing to take this kind of action against perceived threats has been interpreted, at least by some Indians, as a marker of great power status.”

The allegations of extrajudicial killings, which might violate worldwide legislation, may increase tough questions for western international locations which have pursued an more and more shut strategic and financial relationship with Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata occasion (BJP) authorities, together with pushing for intelligence-sharing agreements.

A former senior Raw official who served earlier than Modi’s premiership denied that extrajudicial killings had been a part of the company’s remit. He confirmed that nothing can be completed with out the data of the nationwide safety adviser, who would then report it to the prime minister, and from time to time they might report on to the prime minister. “I could not do anything without their approval,” he mentioned.

The former Raw official claimed that the killings had been extra more likely to have been carried out by Pakistan themselves, a view that has been echoed by others in India.

Pakistani businesses denied this, pointing to an inventory of greater than two dozen dissidents residing in Pakistan to whom they’d just lately issued direct warnings of threats to their lives and instructed them to enter hiding. Three people in Pakistan mentioned they’d been given these warnings. They claimed others who had not heeded the threats and continued their regular routines had been now useless.