India | Pakistan

ISLAMABAD - Pakistan and India on Tuesday in pursuance of the Agreement on Consular Access, 2008 exchanged the lists of 246 Indian and 463 Pakistani prisoners in each other’s custody through diplomatic channels.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday said that the government has decided to enhance the country’s water storage capacity, given India’s designs to weaponise water. India in April held the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance following the attack in occupied Kashmir’s Pahalgam that killed 26 — an incident New Delhi blamed on Islamabad without evidence. The treaty allocates the Indus Basin’s six rivers between the two countries: India gets the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej), while Pakistan receives nearly 80 per cent of the water from the western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab). Pakistan termed any attempt to suspend its water share an “act of war”, noting the IWT had no provision for unilateral suspension. It later said it was considering court action, citing a violation of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in Hague also ruled India cannot unilaterally suspend or hold the IWT in abeyance. During a visit to the National Emergencies Operations C...

Pakistan and India have exchanged updated lists of prisoners held in each other’s custody, in accordance with the 2008 Agreement on Consular Access, which mandates the exchange of such information twice a year—on January 1 and July 1.

At least 39 people died in a factory fire in India’s southern state of Telangana, a senior fire department official said on Tuesday, after an explosion at Sigachi Industries, a day earlier. The explosion also injured 34, according to officials. The government of Telangana, where the facility is located, has formed a five-member committee to probe the incident, the cause of which is yet to be disclosed by the company. “We are still clearing the debris […] The building has collapsed and fabricated completely,” GV Narayana Rao, director of Telangana fire disaster response emergency, told Reuters. “Once we are all done with the clearing, only then we will be able to assess if any other body is still remaining under the debris or if it is all clear,” he said. On Monday, an explosion occurred at a chemical facility of Sigachi Industries leading to a fire, the police said. Police officials said more than 140 people were working in the plant when the incident occurred. Twenty-five of the deceased were yet to be ident...

ISLAMABAD - Defence Minister Khawaja Mu­hammad Asif on Monday said that Pakistan’s stance was rec­ognized and upheld during the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, where India was unable to as­sert its position.

India asked to resume IWT compliance

The Foreign Office (FO) on Monday welcomed the decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague to issue a “supplemental award” in the Indus Waters case, urging India to resume the functioning of the Treaty, which it has held in abeyance since May. According to the PCA’s rules, a supplemental award is an additional ruling issued by a court or tribunal after its initial decision, usually to address a specific issue that wasn’t fully resolved or to clarify certain points, such as jurisdiction, competence, or interpretation of a treaty or agreement. India in April held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance following the attack in occupied Kashmir’s Pahalgam that killed 26 — an incident New Delhi blamed on Islamabad without evidence. Pakistan termed any attempt to suspend its water share an “act of war”, noting the IWT had no provision for unilateral suspension. It later said it was considering court action, citing a violation of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. “In a supplemental...

Pakistan on Monday called on India to immediately restore the normal functioning of the Indus Waters Treaty and fulfill its obligations under the agreement.

Defence Minister Khawaja Asif has said that India’s misleading position on the Indus Waters Treaty has not found support in the international community, reiterating that the treaty cannot be suspended unilaterally.

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar has cautioned India to reconsider its aggressive stance towards Pakistan, asserting that New Delhi cannot impose its will on Islamabad or undermine regional stability.

An Indian aviation minister on Sunday said investigators were probing “all angles” behind the Air India crash earlier this month when asked by the media about possible sabotage. All but one of the 242 people on board the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner were killed when it crashed in the western city of Ahmedabad on June 12. Authorities have identified 19 others who died on the ground, but a police source told AFP after the crash that the toll was 38. India’s minister of state for civil aviation, Murlidhar Mohol, said the investigation was looking at “all angles” when asked specifically about possible “sabotage”, in an interview with Indian news channel NDTV. “It has never happened before that both engines have shut off together,” Mohol said earlier in the interview, in reference to theories by some experts of possible dual-engine failure. The minister added that until the investigation report is published, it would be premature to comment on the cause. The team appointed to investigate the crash started extracting da...

“India’s attempts to portray itself as a victim of terrorism have backfired.

• Court of Arbitration rules that New Delhi’s decision to hold Indus treaty in abeyance doesn’t affect its competence to hear and decide disputes • Islamabad welcomes, India rejects ‘supplemental award’ as it exposes Kishenganga and Ratle hydel projects to Pakistan’s objections ISLAMABAD: In a major boon for Pakistan in its dispute over the ‘one-sided’ suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague has ruled that India’s actions have no bearing on its competence to adjudicate the matter. The court found that its competence cannot be affected by the unilateral decision of a party taken after the initiation of arbitral proceedings, regardless of whether India’s recent decision was characterised as a suspension of the treaty, or otherwise. The court further found that it has a continuing responsibility to advance proceedings in a timely, efficient and fair manner, notwithstanding India’s position on “abeyance”. It also declared that these findings also apply to the N...

Pakistan on Friday welcomed the decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague to issue a “Supplemental Award of Competence” in the Indus Waters case, stating that India cannot unilaterally hold the treaty in abeyance, a statement issued by the government said. According to the PCA’s rules, a supplemental award is an additional ruling issued by a court or tribunal after its initial decision, usually to address a specific issue that wasn’t fully resolved or to clarify certain points, such as jurisdiction, competence, or interpretation of a treaty or agreement. India in April held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance following the attack in occupied Kashmir’s Pahalgam that killed 26 — an incident New Delhi blamed on Islamabad without evidence. Pakistan termed any attempt to suspend its water share an “act of war”, noting the IWT had no provision for unilateral suspension. It later said it was considering court action, citing a violation of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Acc...

India has deported without trial to Bangladesh hundreds of people, officials from both sides said, drawing condemnation from activists and lawyers who call the recent expulsions illegal and based on ethnic profiling. New Delhi says the people deported are undocumented migrants. The Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has long taken a hardline stance on immigration — particularly those from neighbouring Muslim-majority Bangladesh — with top officials referring to them as “termites” and “infiltrators”. It has also sparked fear among India’s estimated 200 million Muslims, especially among speakers of Bengali, a widely spoken language in both eastern India and Bangladesh. “Muslims, particularly from the eastern part of the country, are terrified,” said veteran Indian rights activist Harsh Mander. “You have thrown millions into this existential fear.” Bangladesh, largely encircled by land by India, has seen relations with New Delhi turn icy since a mass uprising in 2024 toppled Dhaka’s gov...

Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh told his Chinese counterpart that the two countries should seek a “permanent solution” to their decades-old border dispute, India’s defence ministry said on Friday. Singh met China’s Dong Jun on the sidelines of the meeting of the defence ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Qingdao on Thursday and stressed on solving issues between the two countries through a structured roadmap, the ministry said in a statement. The world’s two most populous nations — both nuclear powers — share a 3,800-km, largely undemarcated and disputed border in the Himalayas and have gone to war over it. Although the frontier has been mostly peaceful in recent decades, a deadly clash between their troops in 2020 resulted in the deaths of 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers. The clash led to a four-year military standoff with both armies deploying tens of thousands of troops in the mountains until they reached a pact in October to step back, leading to a thaw in ties. During h...

ISLAMABAD - Federal Minister for Climate Change and Environmental Coordination, Dr Musadik Malik, on Thursday said that India destabilized the region by launching a war against Pakistan without presenting any evidence.

Efforts are underway to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the Air India plane crash this month that killed 260 people, and identify contributing factors, India’s civil aviation ministry said on Thursday. The London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed moments after takeoff from India’s Ahmedabad city on June 12, killing 241 of the 242 people on board and the rest on ground in the world’s worst aviation disaster in a decade. The black boxes of the plane — the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) — were recovered in the days that followed, one from the rooftop of a building at the crash site on June 13, and the other from the debris on June 16. They were transported to national capital Delhi on Tuesday, where a team led by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau began extracting their data, the ministry said in a statement. “The Crash Protection Module (CPM) from the front black box was safely retrieved, and […] the memory module was successfully accessed and its data do...

India on Thursday refused to endorse the joint communique issued at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Defence Ministers’ meeting in Qingdao, China, after its attempt to link Pakistan to the recent Pahalgam attack was dismissed by member states.

Nasa retiree turned private astronaut Peggy Whitson was launched on the fifth flight to orbit of her career early on Wednesday, joined by crewmates from India, Poland and Hungary heading for their countries’ first visit to the International Space Station (ISS). The astronaut team lifted off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at about 2:30am EDT (11:30am PKT), beginning the latest mission organized by Texas-based startup Axiom Space in partnership with Elon Musk’s rocket venture SpaceX. The four-member crew was carried aloft on a towering SpaceX launch vehicle consisting of a Crew Dragon capsule perched atop a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket. Live video showed the towering spacecraft streaking into the night sky over Florida’s Atlantic coast trailed by a brilliant yellowish plume of fiery exhaust. Cameras inside the crew compartment beamed footage of the four astronauts strapped into their pressurized cabin, seated calmly side by side in helmeted white-and-black flight suits as their spacec...