LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistani authorities are investigating the murder of a man suspected in a fatal attack more than a decade ago on an Indian national imprisoned for espionage, a police official said Saturday.
The probe comes months after Pakistan accused India’s intelligence agency of being involved in the extrajudicial killings of its citizens, saying it had credible evidence linking two Indian agents to the deaths of two Pakistanis in Pakistan last year.
The man who died in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on Saturday was Amir Tamba. He was a suspect in the death of Sarabjit Singh, an Indian national who was convicted of spying in Pakistan and handed a death sentence in 1991.
But Singh died in 2013 after inmates attacked him in a Lahore prison. His fate inflamed tensions between the two South Asian nuclear-armed rivals.
Tamba was accused of being involved in Singh’s death but was not convicted.
The deputy inspector general of police in Lahore, Ali Nasir Rizvi, said gunmen entered Tamba’s house and shot him. They fled the scene on a motorbike. Officials from Pakistan’s army and intelligence agency reached the site and removed Tamba’s body, taking it to the city's Combined Military Hospital.
Rizvi said a case had been lodged against unidentified assailants but gave no further information about the case, including a possible motive for the attack.
There was scant coverage of Tamba’s death in Pakistan's media. However, Indian outlets were quick to report on the shooting. There was no immediate comment from the Indian authorities.
Singh was arrested in 1990 for his role in a series of bombings in Lahore and Faisalabad that killed 14 people. His family said he was innocent.
Last year, both the United States and Canada accused Indian agents of links to assassination plots on their soil. India dismissed the allegation of its involvement in the killing in Canada as “absurd."
In the case involving the U.S., India’s foreign ministry said it had set up a high-level committee to investigate the accusations, adding that the alleged link to an Indian official was “a matter of concern” and “against government policy.”