09:06 Jaish chief Masood Azhar is ‘not dead’, says Pak media report:
India’s most wanted terrorist and Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar is “alive”, a Pakistani media report said on Sunday, quoting unnamed sources close to his family.
The media reports claiming that JeM leader is dead are false, Geo Urdu News reported.
The report came amid speculation on social media that JeM founder has died.
However, there was no official confirmation.
Quoting unnamed sources close to the family of the JeM chief, the channel said Azhar is “alive”, without elaborating on his health condition.
There was no official word on Azhar’s fate from the Pakistan government.
“I don’t know anything at this moment,” Pakistan’s Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said, when asked about media reports claiming death of Azhar.
A resident of Bahawalpur in Pakistan’s Punjab province, Azhar formed the Jaish-e-Mohammed in 2000.
The 50-year-old Azhar, who was released by the National Democratic Alliance government in 1999 in exchange of hostages of the hijacked Indian Airlines plane IC-814, has been accused of being the mastermind of the 2001 Parliament attack, suicide attack on Jammu and Kashmir state assembly, attack on the Pathankot IAF base and the latest Pulwama terror strike.
08:21 Cong’s Khurshid says Abhinandan ‘matured’ as fighter pilot under UPA, draws flak:
Former union minster and Congress leader Salman Khurshid said IAF pilot Abhinandan Varthaman earned his flying badge in 2004 and “matured” as a fighter pilot during the UPA rule, remarks which attracted criticism on the social media.
“Many kudos for Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, the face of India’s resistance to enemy aggression. Great poise and confidence in face of adversity. We are proud that he received his wings in 2004 and matured as fighter pilot during UPA,” Khurshid tweeted.
After attracting criticism on the social media for “taking credit”, Khurshid on Sunday said that he had only “stated the truth”.
“I had said that he (the pilot) joined the IAF during our tenure. I had only stated the truth,” he told reporters.
After being held in captivity for nearly 60 hours, Wing Commander Abhinandan was released by Pakistan and handed over to India at the Attari-Wagah border on Friday night.
Days after Pulwama attack of February 14, which left 40 CRPF personnel dead, the Indian Air Force carried out an air strike at Jaish-e-Mohammed terror camp inside Pakistan.
Pakistan retaliated by attempting to bomb Indian military installations on Wednesday morning. The attempt was foiled by the Indian Air Force. In an ensuing dogfight, Varthaman’s MiG-21 was shot down after he brought down a Pakistani F-16 fighter jet.
— PTI
07:53 Tornado kills 14 in US state of Alabama:
A tornado killed 14 people and caused “catastrophic” damage in the southern US state of Alabama on Sunday, a local sheriff said.
“At this time, we have 14 confirmed fatalities,” Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones said in a video posted on Facebook by a journalist from a local CBS affiliate.
Other people have been hospitalised, some with “very serious injuries”, while the search is still continuing for more who are missing, he said.
Jones described the damage caused by the storm as “catastrophic, based on the destruction of homes that we’ve seen”. The swath of destruction caused by the storm was a quarter mile (0.4 kilometres) wide and stretched for the “several miles that it travelled on the ground”, according to Jones.
While the sheriff referred to a single storm, some US media outlets reported that multiple twisters had hit the county.
Source: Rediff