Pakistan’s military claimed it shot down five Indian Air Force jets, including three French-made Rafales, in a major escalation of cross-border hostilities potentially marking the first combat loss of the advanced aircraft.
Pakistan’s military spokesperson, Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif, told reporters on Wednesday that the jets were targeted from within Pakistani airspace in retaliation for earlier Indian airstrikes.
He said Indian operations had killed at least 26 civilians across Pakistan, including women and children. Another five civilians were reported dead due to Indian shelling along the Line of Control in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
“We only targeted Indian planes after they attacked Pakistan,” Lt Gen Sharif said. Indian officials, so far, have remained silent on the matter.
India’s Press Information Bureau, however, warned people against old images being circulated on social media by pro-Pakistan handles. “An old image showing a crashed aircraft is being circulated with the claim that Pakistan recently shot down an Indian Rafale jet near Bahawalpur during the ongoing Operation Sindoor. #PIBFactCheck: This image is from an earlier incident involving an IAF MiG-21 fighter jet that crashed in Moga district in Punjab in 2021,” PIB posted on its official X handle.
The Pakistani military said the downed aircraft included three Rafale fighter jets and one each of Russian-made Su-30 and MiG-29 models. Indian authorities have not issued a statement responding to the claims.
If verified, the downing of the Rafale fighters would represent the most significant loss for the Indian Air Force in decades and could signal a turning point in the volatile relations between the nuclear-armed neighbours.
A senior French intelligence official told CNN that at least one Rafale operated by India was brought down by Pakistani forces. French authorities are looking into whether more than one Rafale jet was shot down, the official added, according to CNN anchor Jim Scuitto. The Independent could not verify these claims.
Earlier, Pakistan prime minister Shehbaz Sharif claimed that Pakistan Air Force reduced Indian jets to “smithereens”, as he warned the country would avenge the deaths of those killed by India’s strikes. “In an hour-long air battle, our pilots blew up the jets of the enemy to smithereens,” he said in an address to the nation on state television Wednesday night local time. “It only took a few hours for the enemy to fall on its knees,” he claimed.
Pakistan’s defence minister Khwaja Asif told CNN that their armed forces responded with missile fire, downing Indian jets in a “dogfight”, calling it a “befitting lesson”.
When pressed for evidence by a CNN anchor, Mr Asif said: “It’s all over the social media. It’s Indian social media. Not our social media. The debris of these jets fell into the Indian occupied Kashmir and it is all over the Indian media today.”
“You are the defence minister,” responded the anchor. “The reason to talk to you about today is to not talk about the content all over social media. I am asking for a very specifically for the evidence. For example, was there any Chinese equipment used by Pakistan to down these Rafale jets, as I understand you are alleging them to be.”
“No Chinese equipment,” said Mr Asif, adding “We have Chinese planes … but they are manufactured and assembled in Pakistan now.” However, Mr Asif did not provide any evidence supporting the claim about the downing of the Indian jets.
The Rafale, a twin-engine, multirole fighter capable of launching from both aircraft carriers and land bases, is among the most advanced jets in the Indian fleet. Designed by Dassault Aviation, the aircraft was acquired as part of New Delhi’s efforts to upgrade its military capabilities and reduce reliance on Russian-origin systems.
India initially procured 36 Rafales and signed an additional deal last month with Dassault to purchase 26 more for the navy in a contract worth Rs 630bn (£6.1bn). The new batch is expected to be delivered by 2030.
Photos from Wuyan, a village in India-administered Kashmir, showed wreckage believed to be an external fuel tank. Trevor Ball, an associate researcher at Armament Research Services, said it likely belonged to a Mirage or Rafale aircraft, though he could not confirm whether the plane had been shot down.
John E Pike, director of the US-based GlobalSecurity.org, told The New York Times that the jets could have been downed by either surface-to-air or air-to-air missiles. “Pakistan has both,” he said.
Pakistan said at least 31 of its civilians had been killed and 46 wounded and that India “had ignited an inferno in the region”. This included deaths from the strikes and border shelling.
Islamabad pledged to respond “at a time, place and manner of its choosing to avenge the loss of innocent Pakistani lives and blatant violation of its sovereignty”, emphatically rejecting Indian allegations it had terrorist camps on its territory.
“For the blatant mistake that India made last night, it will now have to pay the price,” Mr Sharif said in a televised address on state broadcaster PTV. “Perhaps they thought that we would retreat, but they forgot that…this is a nation of brave people.”
Mr Asif told broadcaster Geo News that Islamabad would only strike Indian military targets and not civilians, in retaliation. India told more than a dozen foreign envoys in New Delhi that “if Pakistan responds, India will respond”, fuelling fears of a larger military conflict in one of the world’s most dangerous – and most populated – nuclear flashpoint regions.
