PESHAWAR, Pakistan // A new Pakistani Taliban group behind a deadly suicide bombing on the Pakistan-Indian border has said the attack was as much aimed at India as Pakistan, suggesting that Indian targets might be next.
At least 57 Pakistanis were killed during a popular flag-lowering ceremony at the Wagah border post on Sunday.
Ehsanullah Ehsan, a prominent militant and spokesman for the new group, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan Jamaat Ahrar (TTP-JA), said he had warned the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi that attacks in India were in the pipeline.
“I have already conveyed it to Modi ... that if our suicide bombers can carry out attacks on this side of the border, they can easily do it on other side of the border in India,” he said in a telephone conversation on Wednesday.
“I told him that his hands are red with the blood of Kashmiri mujahideen and innocent people of Gujarat for which he would have to pay the price.”
He earlier tweeted in English: “You [Modi] are the killer of hundreds of Muslims. We will take the revenge of innocent people of Kashmir and Gugrat”. An Indian intelligence official said the account appeared genuine.
Thousands of militanst and civilians have been killed in a decades-long separtists insurgency in India-administered Kashmir, the Muslim-majority Himalayan region that Pakistan also claims.
Gujarat – misspelt in the tweet – is the western Indian state where more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed in religious riots in 2002, when Mr Modi was its chief minister.
India has long accused Pakistani militants of trying to attack its targets, particularly after the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which 166 people were killed when Pakistani gunmen went on a three-day rampage in the city.
The central Pakistani Taliban, known as the TTP, which is fighting to topple the Pakistani government and establish an Islamic theocracy, has effectively disintegrated this year and split into a range of smaller groups such as TTP-JA who appear to be exploiting their ties to Al Qaeda to broaden their mission beyond Pakistan.
Mr Ehsan said that unlike the TTP’s narrow focus on war in the tribal areas on the Afghan border, his outfit sought to attack countries around the region.
“The TTP focuses on Pakistan only, while we have a global agenda of jihad – and therefore we have people from all over the world including the Arab and western world for this mission.”
TTP-JA has announced its support for the extremist militant group ISIL, whose belligerent anti-western ideology has begun to inspire militants across South Asia.
The TTP-JA’s openly anti-Indian rhetoric differs from that of the mainstream Pakistani Taliban, who are mainly focused on their insurgency against Pakistani security forces in the volatile tribal north-west of the country.
A successful attack on an Indian target would severely affect the already frosty relations between New Delhi and Islamabad.
* Reuters