MUMBAI: India has summoned the top Pakistani diplomat in New Delhi, local media reported on Thursday, a day after it announced measures to downgrade ties with Islamabad as relations between the nuclear-armed rivals plummeted following a deadly militant attack in Kashmir.
A day after suspected militants killed 26 men at a tourist destination in Kashmir in the worst attack on civilians in the country in nearly two decades, Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said there was cross-border involvement in the attack and New Delhi would suspend a six-decade old river-sharing treaty as well as close the only land crossing between the neighbors.
India will also pull out its defense attaches in Pakistan and also reduce staff size at its mission in Islamabad to 30 from 55, Misri said.
India has summoned the top diplomat in the Pakistan embassy in New Delhi, local media reported, to give notice that all defense advisers in the Pakistani mission were persona non grata and given a week to leave, one of the measures Misri announced on Wednesday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called for an all-party meeting with opposition parties on Thursday, to brief them on the government’s response to the attack.
In Islamabad, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was scheduled to hold a meeting of the National Security Committee to discuss Pakistan’s response, Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said in a post on X.
The Indus water treaty, mediated by the World Bank, split the Indus River and its tributaries between the neighbors and regulated the sharing of water. It had so far withstood even wars between the neighbors.
India would hold the treaty in abeyance, Misri said.
Diplomatic ties between the two countries were weak even before the latest measures were announced as Pakistan had expelled India’s envoy and not posted its own ambassador in New Delhi after India revoked the semi-autonomous status of Kashmir in 2019.
Tuesday’s attack is seen as a setback to what Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party have projected as a major achievement in revoking the special status Jammu and Kashmir enjoyed and bringing peace and development to the long-troubled Muslim-majority region.
India calls all-party meet, summons top Pakistani diplomat after Kashmir attack on tourists
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India calls all-party meet, summons top Pakistani diplomat after Kashmir attack on tourists
- The development follows the killing of 26 people at a tourist resort in Indian-administered Kashmir
- New Delhi has further downgraded diplomatic ties, alleging cross-border involvement from Pakistan
Pakistan's Sindh announces judicial inquiry into deadly Karachi plaza fire
- Around 80 people were killed in Karachi Gul Plaza fire that broke out on Jan. 17, says Sindh information minister
- Says initial fact-finding committee discovered fire tenders were provided water with delay, which affected firefighting
ISLAMABAD: Sindh Information Minister Sharjeel Inam Memon announced on Thursday that the provincial government has requested a judicial inquiry into a deadly Karachi shopping plaza inferno that killed around 80 people earlier this month.
The fire broke out at Karachi's famous Gul Plaza, a multi-story shopping complex in the city's Saddar area, on the night of Jan. 17. The blaze killed 80 and took three days to extinguish, while rescue and relief efforts took over a week.
Speaking to reporters during a news conference, Memon said a Sindh cabinet sub-committee, chaired by Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah, reviewed a fact-finding committee report on the Karachi Gul Plaza fire.
He said the fact-finding committee discovered that the Civil Defense department conducted fire safety audits of the mall and other buildings since 2023, but no effective, precautionary or legal action was taken to ensure such incidents were avoided. He said as a result, the Civil Defense director and the department's additional controller for district South were both suspended.
"A letter is being written to the honorable chief justice of the Sindh High Court in which we are requesting the chief justice to appoint a serving judge for a judicial inquiry," Memon said.
"So that we can review everything in accordance with the law himself and take decisions on it."
Memon said that there were around 2,000 to 2,500 people in the building when the fire broke out, adding that these included workers and visitors.
He said the sub-committee had also noted that fire tenders were provided water with delay which affected the firefighting services of the Karachi Municipal Corporation (KMC), Rescue 1122 and fire brigades.
The minister said the government had also suspended the chief engineer and in-charge hydrants of the Karachi Water and Sewerage Corporation, and that action will be taken against them.
Memon said the committee had also concluded that the KMC, Rescue 1122 and fire brigades' firefighting tools and training to deal with an inferno of such a scale were "inadequate."
He said the government has also suspended the senior director of municipal services in the KMC and that departmental action against him will be taken for not ensuring that the fire staff was properly prepared to tackle such a blaze.
The minister said the sub-committee had directed the relevant department to carry out a needs assessment so that the firefighting capabilities of the provincial and local government are further strengthened.
Fires have become an increasingly frequent occurrence in Karachi, a megacity of more than 20 million people, where fire services remain severely overstretched and under-resourced relative to population density and the scale of commercial activity.
Successive deadly incidents have drawn criticism of the provincial Sindh administration over lax enforcement of building codes, inadequate inspections and limited emergency response capacity.
Sindh's opposition parties, especially the Muttahida Quami Movement-Pakistan, accuse the Sindh government of neglecting Karachi's infrastructural development. The provincial government rejects these allegations.
