Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said on Tuesday he expected “better sense” from India after its jets struck what it called terror camps in Pakistan.
Qureshi warned India not to challenge Pakistan and said “better sense should prevail in India”, according to a statement cited by state-run Radio Pakistan.
“The Foreign Minister said the nation should not be worried over the Indian act as the defenders of the country are fully prepared to respond to any misadventure,” Radio Pakistan added on its website.
The airstrikes hit a training camp of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), the group that claimed credit for a suicide car bomb attack killed at least 40 Indian paramilitary police in Kashmir on Feb. 14, ratcheting up tensions between the two nuclear armed neighbors.
The action was ordered as India said it had intelligence that the group was planning more attacks.
“In the face of imminent danger, a preemptive strike became absolutely necessary,” Foreign Minister Vijay Gokhale told reporters.
He said “a very large number” of militants were killed in a strike on a training base in Balakot, a town in a remote valley in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, but did not provide a precise figure for the casualties.
The strike near the town of Balakot was the deepest cross-border raid launched by India since the last of its three wars with Pakistan in 1971.
Pakistan denies harboring JeM, a primarily anti-India group that forged ties with al-Qaeda and has been on a UN terror list since 2001. In December 2001, Jaish fighters, along with members of another Pakistan-based militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, launched an attack on India's parliament, which almost led to a fourth war.
China, Pakistan's long-time ally, urged both countries to exercise restraint as tensions rose to the highest in years.
"We hope that India and Pakistan can exercise restraint, and take steps that are conducive to stabilizing the regional situation and improving bilateral ties, rather than the opposite," Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a daily news briefing in Beijing.
A senior Indian government source said that 300 militants had been killed in the strikes and that the warplanes had ventured as far as 80 km (50 miles) inside Pakistan. But no evidence was immediately provided to back up the claims of militant casualties.
"I want to assure you our country is in safe hands," Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a cheering political rally in western India hours after the raid.
"I won't let the country down," said Modi, who faces a tight election in coming months.
