CHANDIGARH: Indian Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal called off on Tuesday a meeting with Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit a day after a gun battle in Gurdaspur left 10 people dead.
The meeting between Badal and Basit was to be held on July 29 in Chandigarh.
Harcharan Bains, adviser to chief minister on national affairs and media, said that the meeting was called off “in view of today’s incident at Dinanagar in Gurdaspur district”.
Further, Bains said it was Basit who had requested for a courtesy call during his visit to Chandigarh this week.
On Monday, gunmen dressed in military fatigues killed at least 10 people, including three civilians, in India’s Punjab state before being shot dead in a 12-hour-long gunfight with security forces in a small-town police station near the border with Pakistan.
Security sources in India claimed the attackers were suspected to belong to either Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammad. “None of them were Sikhs,” one unnamed Indian security official said.
INP