India said on Thursday that it had retaliated to destroy an air defence system in Lahore after Pakistan launched an overnight air attack using ‘drones and missiles’.
‘Pakistan attempted to engage a number of military targets ... using drones and missiles,’ India’s defence ministry said in a statement, adding that ‘these were neutralised’ by air defence systems.
New Delhi said that areas targeted included sites in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, and India’s Punjab state -- including the key cities of Amritsar, Ludhiana, Chandigarh -- as well as Bhuj in Gujarat state.
‘The debris of these attacks is now being recovered from a number of locations,’ it added.
The defence ministry said that on Thursday morning its military had ‘targeted air defence radars and systems at a number of locations in Pakistan’, saying that the ‘response has been in the same domain, with the same intensity, as Pakistan’.
It added that it had been ‘reliably learnt that an air defence system at Lahore has been neutralised’.
India also accused Pakistan of having ‘increased the intensity of its unprovoked firing across the Line of Control using mortars and heavy calibre artillery’ across the de facto border in Jammu and Kashmir
India also said the number of people who have been killed by Pakistani firing since the escalation of violence on Wednesday had risen to 16, including three women and five children.
India added that it remained committed to ‘non escalation, provided it is respected by the Pakistani military’.