In India’s shadow war with Pakistan, a campaign of covert killings
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has cast himself as more willing to take on India’s enemies beyond its borders than any other leader since independence.
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LAHORE, Pakistan — Shortly after 12:30 p.m. on a sweltering day last April, two masked gunmen walked into a working-class home in Lahore, identified a 48-year-old man known as Tamba and fired three shots at close range into his chest and leg, according to a Pakistani police report. The assailants then sped off on a Honda motorbike, leaving Tamba in a pool of blood on the second floor.
Tamba, whose real name was Amir Sarfaraz, had old enemies. The gangster had been accused of beating an Indian intelligence agent to death inside a Lahore prison in 2011 while both men were serving time on death row, but he was released, cleared of charges. Outraged Indian authorities suspected that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, had hired Tamba to carry out the jailhouse murder, according to a former Indian official, and now, thirteen years later, they seemed to get their revenge.
Soon after, Pakistani Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi told reporters that there had been several recent killings that showed signs of “India’s direct involvement.” Referring to the Tamba case, he added, “The pattern is exactly the same.”
The incident appeared to be the most recent example of what Pakistani officials call a striking development in the long-running shadow war between the two South Asian rivals. Although India and Pakistan have long used militant groups to sow chaos in each other’s country, India’s intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), has since 2021 deployed a methodical assassination program to kill at least a half dozen people deep within Pakistan, according to Pakistani and Western officials.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has cast himself as tougher and more willing to take on India’s enemies than any other leader since Indian independence. Since last year, India’s relations with Western governments have been rocked by allegations that RAW officials also ordered the assassination of Sikh separatists in Canada and the United States — operations that appeared to be an outgrowth of a campaign first tested and refined in Pakistan.
Repression’s long arm
The murder-for-hire operations India used to target dissidents in the West were tested and refined in Pakistan, a Washington Post investigation found. The Post is investigating a global surge in campaigns of cross-border repression. The US and other Western governments have struggled to stem this phenomenon. As a result, sanctuary for those fleeing persecution is shrinking on nearly every continent.
The Washington Post examined six cases in Pakistan through interviews with Pakistani and Indian officials, the militants’ allies and family members, and a review of police documents and other evidence collected by Pakistani investigators. They reveal the contours of an ambitious Indian assassination program with marked similarities to the operations in North America.
In Pakistan, the killings were carried out by Pakistani petty criminals or Afghan hired guns, never Indian nationals, officials said. To aid deniability, RAW officers employed businessmen in Dubai, a regional commercial hub, as intermediaries and deployed separate, siloed teams to surveil targets, execute killings and funnel payments from dozens of informal, unregulated banking networks known as hawalas set up in multiple continents, according to Pakistani investigators. But the RAW also at times used sloppy tradecraft and poorly trained contractors, mirroring what was observed by U.S. and Canadian law enforcement.
The killings in Pakistan typically targeted the alleged leaders of two United Nations-designated terrorist groups — Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad — which have been accused by India of attacking Indian troops or, years ago, Indian citizens. The Sikh separatists who were targeted in Canada and the United States, Hardeep Singh Nijjar and Gurpatwant Pannun, were also designated as terrorists by India, although Western officials and analysts have disputed the persuasiveness of the Indian evidence against them.
Many details of the Indian operations in Pakistan have not been previously reported. Pakistani and Indian officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence activities and ongoing investigations.
The killings are a delicate subject in Pakistan because they call into question the counterintelligence capabilities of its security services — and Pakistan’s claims that it does not shelter terrorists. But some Pakistani officials now argue that as India under Modi grows into a world power, it should be exposed for carrying out extrajudicial killings with impunity.
Even before the U.S. and Canadian allegations came to light, ISI’s director general, Nadeem Anjum, in 2022 had raised serious concerns about Indian assassinations to CIA Director William J. Burns, said a former Pakistani official.
“Our concerns arose independent of the U.S. and Canadian investigations,” said a current Pakistani official. “Can India rise peacefully? Our answer is no.”
India’s Ministry of External Affairs declined to comment for this article. But in the past, Indian officials have neither confirmed nor denied their role in specific killings and maintained that assassinations are not part of Indian policy. These officials, at the same time, often point out that Pakistan and Western countries have refused to extradite terrorists despite India providing evidence of their crimes and that numerous Islamist militants in Pakistan have been killed by the United States, primarily in drone strikes.
After India passed a stringent anti-terrorism law revision in 2019, its home ministry began publishing a list of designated terrorists, which has occasionally been updated. A review by The Post found that 11 out of 58 names on the current list have been reported killed since 2021 or were targeted since then. The Post counted at least ten other men who were not on the most-wanted list but have been accused by India of militancy and died under similar circumstances: bullets fired at close range by unknown gunmen.
The Tamba case demonstrates the difficulty of penetrating the shadowy struggle between the two rival intelligence agencies with certainty. While the police report said Tamba had been killed and some Pakistani officials said so as well, several others familiar with the case reported he had survived, and one person who said he had been briefed by security officials even said that Pakistan had faked Tamba’s death to fool an RAW handler into divulging the next target on the hit list.
Since the late 1990s, when India and Pakistan both declared themselves to be nuclear weapons states, each country has pondered how to undermine the other with plausible deniability and without risking an all-out war.
In 2014, the current Indian national security adviser, Ajit Doval, said it was unrealistic to invade Pakistan but that India should use covert means to punish Pakistan for backing militant groups that attack Indian troops and civilians. “We can defend ourselves by going to the place from where the offense is coming,” Doval told a university audience. “Pakistan’s vulnerability is many, many times higher than India’s.”
A violent history
The conflict between India and Pakistan reaches back to the bloody partition of British India in 1947, when both of the newly independent countries laid claim to Kashmir. In the ensuing decades, Pakistan backed Islamist extremists who sought to drive India out of that mountainous, Muslim-majority region, while India tried to undermine Pakistan by arming ethnic separatists in its Baluchistan and Sindh provinces.
In the late 1990s, Indian Prime Minister I.K. Gujral curbed many of India’s covert operations inside Pakistan as bilateral relations thawed. But Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group widely believed to be backed by Pakistani intelligence, carried out an attack in 2008 that killed 175 and wounded more than 300, and U.S. Special Forces assassinated Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. After that, senior RAW officials pushed for operations to kill high-level individuals inside Pakistan, said a former Indian official and a senior government adviser.
In 2012, V.K. Singh, an Indian Army general who led a group that conducted small-scale bombings inside Pakistan, sought to assassinate the Kashmiri militant leader Syed Salahuddin in Pakistan, a former Indian official said. (Salahuddin remains alive.) One former Pakistani official said Pakistan believed India also played a role in the 2013 shooting outside an Islamabad bakery that killed Nasiruddin Haqqani, who had been suspected of bombing the Indian embassy in Kabul.
But it wasn’t until 2021, two years after Modi had won reelection while touting his tough-on-Pakistan bona fides, that a spate of targeted killings began.
That June, a Pakistani man hired by Indian intelligence in Dubai detonated a car bomb outside the security perimeter of a Lahore compound that housed Hafiz Saeed, the Lashkar-e-Taiba leader, but the blast failed to reach Saeed, according to Pakistani and Indian officials.
After that, the operations gained pace and precision. Instead of bombs, the RAW seemed to prefer pistol-wielding gunmen. Instead of top leaders, India pursued less guarded militants.
Plots in the West
Around the same time, according to details laid out in a U.S. federal indictment, a RAW officer in New Delhi named Vikash Yadav directed an assassination attempt on Pannun, a Sikh separatist living in New York. The officer instructed his agent, a businessman named Nikhil Gupta, to hire a local assassin. Like Ansari, Yadav directed from afar, seemed pressured for time and made remarks that suggested the existence of an extensive operation to eliminate a long list of targets.
But unlike in Pakistan, U.S. prosecutors said the New York plot was quickly foiled after Gupta unwittingly asked a DEA informant to introduce him to a hit man.
Canadian officials, at the same time, said they also uncovered a sprawling Indian campaign to surveil, intimidate and even kill Sikhs. While criminal elements were employed, as in Pakistan, Indian diplomats stationed in Canada were also enlisted to monitor members of the Sikh diaspora, according to Canadian officials, who cited the diplomats’ private electronic conversations and text messages. It’s unclear how those conversations were obtained.
Christopher Clary, a professor of political science at the State University of New York at Albany who has studied the alleged Indian operations, said the RAW’s record with targeted killings seemed to mirror that of Israel’s external intelligence agency, the Mossad, which successfully carried out assassinations in less-developed countries but whose agents were caught by hotel surveillance cameras while carrying out a 2010 operation to kill a Hamas leader in the modern city of Dubai.
“One read is [the RAW] had been succeeding in Pakistan for a full year before they start developing this effort in the West,” Clary said. “But the tactics, techniques and procedures that worked pretty well in Pakistan didn’t necessarily work in the West.”
Kashmiri tensions spike
Ever since U.S. and Canadian officials discovered the alleged plots in their countries, Western officials and analysts have wondered why India would take the risk of assassinating Western citizens associated with a Sikh separatist movement that poses no immediate threat of violence.
The calculation concerning Pakistan, security analysts and Indian officials say, was different. In several cases, India targeted the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad and their rebranded offshoots, which remain active in the Kashmiri insurgency.
Since 2019, Indian Army officials say at least 50 Indian soldiers have been killed by fighters from Pakistan who infiltrated the mountainous areas near Kashmir, including the Poonch River Valley. These incursions ticked up shortly after Modi infuriated Pakistan and many Kashmiris by fulfilling a long-sought promise of his Hindu nationalist movement by revoking Kashmir’s semiautonomous status and bringing it under New Delhi’s direct control.
A key financier of the attacks, said an Indian counterinsurgency official, was a Kashmiri named Mohammed Riyaz Ahmed, who fled to Pakistan in 1999 and raised funds through Islamic charities associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba. In September 2023, a young man fired a bullet into Riyaz’s head as he knelt to perform predawn prayers inside a mosque in the portion of Kashmir controlled by Pakistan, and five days later, the Resistance Front, the group allegedly funded by Riyaz, struck back.
On Telegram, the group released a video denouncing Riyaz’s assassination and celebrated their revenge attack in Anantnag, in Indian-controlled Kashmir, that killed an Indian policeman and three army officers, including a colonel.
Pakistan goes public
And yet the RAW was undeterred. Four weeks later, a group of men led by a laborer named Muhammad Umair shot Shahid Latif, whom Indian officials had accused of carrying out a raid against an Indian Air Force station in 2016 that derailed a diplomatic outreach between Modi and his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif.
This time, the RAW faced a different kind of blowback. After his arrest, Umair confessed that he had been dispatched from Dubai to personally kill Latif after his co-conspirators had become frustrated with several failed attempts, said two people with knowledge of the matter. According to them, Umair gave up the location of a Dubai safehouse, and before long, Pakistani agents in Dubai broke into the apartment, where they obtained a trove of intelligence but didn’t find its two Indian tenants: Ashok Kumar Anand Salian and Yogesh Kumar. (Umair could not be reached for comment.)
Until that point, Pakistan had rarely acknowledged the Indian operations. But at a news conference in February, Pakistani Foreign Secretary Muhammad Syrus Sajjad Qazi held up scans of passports belonging to Salian and Kumar and accused them of directing the murders of Latif and of Riyaz one month earlier. India dismissed Qazi’s claims as “false and malicious anti-India propaganda.”
Attempts by The Post to locate Salian were unsuccessful. In April, he made his only public appearance in an interview with a pro-government Indian television channel. Wearing dark sunglasses inside a spartan New Delhi apartment, Salian said he was an ordinary business owner in Dubai and employed a Pakistani worker at his cybercafe who might have done things without his knowledge. He denied any connection to the RAW.
“After Pakistan arrested him, they must have seen who was his sponsor in Dubai,” Salian said. “I feel aggrieved that my details are being highlighted and my reputation damaged.”
Salian’s alleged accomplice, Kumar, also could not be located. Anmol Gora, a dairy business owner from the village in Rajasthan state that is listed as Kumar’s birthplace, said Kumar had not been seen there in five years. Residents said he was living in Dubai, Gora said.
“People in the village say he was involved in some shady business, which is why he just disappeared,” Gora said.
Domestic dividends
Pakistan began to publicly call out India this year after what Pakistani officials said was a series of assassinations that seemed to pay domestic dividends for the Modi government.
By late last year, many Indian pro-government television channels were running glowing programs marveling at the RAW’s extraterritorial reach and efficiency. Pakistani officials were particularly galled by Indian news reports that emerged almost immediately after some slayings. “In many cases they celebrated before even our police knew they were killed,” an official said.
A day after the Guardian published a report on assassinations in Pakistan this year, Modi — without explicitly confirming any slaying — boasted during a campaign rally of “entering [India’s enemies’] homes and killing them.” Indian Home Minister Amit Shah, who Canadian officials say was named by Indian diplomats in their private conversations as the senior government official who directed the covert efforts, was similarly blithe. “Whoever did the killings, what’s the problem?” Shah said in a television interview. “The agency will do their jobs. why should we interfere?”
Srinath Raghavan, a prominent Indian military historian and former army officer who served in Kashmir, said the Modi government has publicized special forces raids inside Pakistan and encouraged the production of Bollywood films that glamorize India’s clandestine operators.
“The whole tagline is, ‘This is the New India,’” Raghavan said. “The Modi government came in with the view that you need to strike back, and you need to signal publicly that you’re doing it. It’s aimed at telling Pakistan that we’re willing to come and hit hard, but it also has a domestic component.”
Kashmiri militants at the heart of the conflict say that Indian officials have an incentive to exaggerate their own lethality, and nor can Pakistani officials be taken at a face value. Regardless, analysts say, Indian officials have more than demonstrated their long and lethal reach to Pakistan and the Indian public.
Asad Durrani, a former director general of Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency, said it may be in the interests of some officials in both India and Pakistan to carry on their shadow war, both to destabilize the other and to reap political dividends.
“Any state, or non-state actor, that can get away with an act would do so,” Durrani said. “Neither side is willing to pay the price of peace.”
Mohammad Zubair Khan in Lahore, Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad, Pakistan, Shams Irfan in Srinagar, India, and Anant Gupta in New Delhi contributed to this report.
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