india

Updated: Jul 25, 2019 18:11 IST

2 days after Pakistan PM Imran Khan’s admission that roughly 40,000 terrorists still operated from territory under Islamabad’s control, India asked Pakistan on Thursday to take credible action against terror camps that existed in the country, reported new agency ANI.

ANI reported the Spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs, Raveesh Kumar as saying that since Pakistan PM had “acknowledged presence of training camps & the fact that terrorists were being trained & sent to Kashmir to fight,” it was now time for the Pakistan government to take “credible action against the terror camps” that existed in the areas under its control.

Khan had acknowledged the presence of a large number of militants in his country during an interaction at the US Institute of Peace, a Washington-based think tank funded by the US Congress on Tuesday while on a 3-day trip to the United States. Khan contended his government was being backed by the powerful military in efforts to disarm the militants.

Khan had claimed that his government was the first to decide against armed militias inside Pakistan. “Until we came into power, the governments did not have the political will, because when you talk about the militant groups, they still have about 30,000 to 40,000 armed people who have been trained… have fought either in Afghanistan, maybe in Kashmir,” he had said.

His government, he claimed, was taking over their (militants) institutes and seminaries and placing administrators to monitor and control.

Pakistan in the past has rarely accepted to the presence of militants and their training camps on its soil despite several dossiers of evidence presented by the Indian government.

India has accused the deep state within Pakistan of using militancy as a strategic asset against its forces in Kashmir, Pakistan, however, has mostly been in denial.

Islamabad is in a race against time to act against terror financing of UN designated terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) before October 2019 or risk getting relegated to the black list of countries rated under the international Financial Action Task Force (FATF) agreements.

India had argued that Pakistan be blacklisted by the FATF following a series of terrorist attacks in India, including the 14 February Pulwama attack in which 40 Indian security personnel were killed.

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