New Delhi: Special care was taken to ensure zero collateral damage during Operation Sindoor, the Government of India and the Indian Armed Forces have said in the first briefing after the missiles strikes on nine locations inside Pakistan Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) and Pakistan in the wee hours of Wednesday.
The briefing was held by Indian foreign secretary Vikram Misri, Col Sofiya Qureshi of the Indian Army and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh of the Indian Air Force.
“These were high precision strikes. Appropriate warheads were selected to destroy a building or a group of buildings, without any damage to civilians. No military areas were targeted. All the hits were successful,” it was stated in the briefing.
The targets were selected based on careful analysis of intelligence inputs. They included locations from where the April 22 Pahalgam terror strike and previous attacks on Indian soil were planned and executed, it was clarified. India waited for two weeks for Pakistan to take action against those involved, but no credible steps were taken, the Indian foreign secretary said.
Misri, in his address, mentioned that the murder of 24 Indian tourists and a tourist from Nepal in Pahalgam was the biggest attack on civilians in India after the 26/11 Mumbai terror strikes of 2008. The Resistance Force (TRF) that claimed responsibility for the attack, is a front of the proscribed Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), he added.
The orchestrators of the Pahalgam attacks have been traced back to Pakistan, the Indian foreign secretary said. The massacre was carried out to cause damage to Jammu and Kashmir’s tourism sector that witnessed 23 million footfalls last year, Misri said. It was also an attempt to spark off communal violence across the country, he said.
India has complained about TRF to the UN Security Council, Misri said. He also pointed to the fact that the Security Council has, on April 25, called for necessary action against the perpetrators of the Pahalgam terror attack.
“Though Operation Sindoor was targeted at carefully selected targets that are linked to terror outfits like the LeT, JeM and Hizbul Mujahideen, the Indian Armed Forces are ready to tackle any misadventure on the part of Pakistan,” Col Qureshi said.
