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Pakistan confirms attack on IAF aircraft

Pakistan said it had fired on Indian jet fighters attempting to intrude on its airspace today and had placed surface-to-air missiles at the site where its maritime patrol plane was shot down.

''Two Indian jet fighters tried to enter this area, but were forced to run after we fired at them,'' military spokesman Brigadier Rashid Qureshi said, while accompanying journalists to the crash site near the border with India on the Arabian Sea.

Star News correspondent Vishnu Som, however, reported that an Indian Air Force helicopter convoy to view the wreckage of the Pakistan aircraft shot down yesterday, was abandoned when a missile flash was sighted.

According to Som, three IAF helicopters that were flying around 1.5 km within the Indian side of the border towards the wreckage of the Atlantique aircraft shot down by India yesterday, when a "missile flash" was noticed. The copters at once went into a deep dive, coming to a level of a few metres above ground level, and the mission had to be abandoned.

The first helicopter had a CNN television crew aboard. CNN correspondent Satinder Bindra confirmed the incident, but said he had not seen the flash because he was sitting at the back of the aircraft. The helicopters dove so sharply, he said in an interview on CNN, that he thought, "this is it."

Brigadier Quereshi, however, claimed there had been no firing of missiles by Pakistan on any Indian helicopters. On the downed Pak recce plane yesterday, he said: "The aircraft was under civilian control, and in radio contact with Karachi air traffic control, at the time when it was shot down."

"The aircraft was flying 7,000 feet above sea level in a training area in use by both the Pakistan navy, and by Pakistan International Airlines -- there is no question of airspace violation. The plane landed within Pakistani territory," the Pakistan military's top spokesman said.

"If you see the pictures flashed by BBC, you will see Indian military personnel scampering towards a helicopter with bits of fuselage. They were in a hurry, because they knew they were inside Pakistani territory. That is why they are showing bits of the fuselage in New Delhi. If the plane was within Indian territory, they would have taken journalists to the site, not shown the bits in Delhi. This proves the falsehood of their claim," the brigadier told newsmen on Wednesday.

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