Pakistan says it launches military retaliation against India

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Pakistan’s military said it launched a wave of short-range missiles into India early on Saturday, as tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours escalated closer to a full-scale war.

Pakistan said it had launched Operation “Bunyan-un-Marsoos” — named after a Koranic word roughly meaning a “wall of lead” — as a response to missile and drone attacks by India.

Pakistan’s military said it targeted a storage site for India’s supersonic BrahMos missile in Beas, the Udhampur Air Field in the Indian sub-region of Jammu and Kashmir and an airfield in Pathankot, also in Punjab.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has called a meeting of Pakistan’s National Command Authority, which is responsible for command and control of its nuclear arsenal, the military said on Saturday. The Pakistan Airports Authority said the country’s airspace would be closed until noon. 

On Wednesday, India said it had carried out “precision strikes” on what it said were terrorist camps in Pakistan and the part of the disputed region of Kashmir that Pakistan administers.

The assault was India’s most extensive military attack on its neighbour in decades, and was in response to the mass shooting of 26 Indians and a Nepali citizen in Pahalgam, a tourist hub in Indian-administered Kashmir, on April 22. India blames the attack on militants backed by Pakistan, which Pakistan denies.

This is a developing story