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LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistani authorities are investigating the shooting death of a man who had been acquitted of killing accused Indian spy Sarabjit Singh in a Lahore prison in 2013, a police official said Sunday.
Pakistan has previously accused India’s intelligence agency of being involved in killings inside Pakistan, saying it had credible evidence linking two Indian agents to the deaths of two Pakistanis last year.
The man who died in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on Sunday was Amir Tamba. He was a suspect in the death of Sarabjit Singh, an Indian national who was convicted of spying in Pakistan and handed a death sentence in 1991.
But Singh died in 2013 after inmates attacked him in a Lahore prison. His fate inflamed tensions between the two South Asian nuclear-armed rivals.
Tamba and a second man went on trial for Singh’s death but were acquitted in 2018 due to lack of evidence.
The deputy inspector general of police in Lahore, Ali Nasir Rizvi, said gunmen entered Tamba’s house and shot him. They fled the scene on a motorbike. Officials from Pakistan’s army and intelligence agency reached the site and removed Tamba’s body, taking it to the city's Combined Military Hospital.
Rizvi said a case had been lodged against unidentified assailants but gave no further information about the case, including a possible motive for the attack.
There was slow coverage of Tamba’s death in Pakistan's media. However, Indian outlets were quick to report on the shooting. There was no immediate comment from the Indian authorities.
Singh was arrested in 1990 for his role in a series of bombings in Lahore and Faisalabad that killed 14 people. His family said he was innocent.
Last year, both the United States and Canada accused Indian agents of links to assassination plots on their soil. India dismissed the allegation of its involvement in the killing in Canada as “absurd."
In the case involving the U.S., India’s foreign ministry said it had set up a high-level committee to investigate the accusations, adding that the alleged link to an Indian official was “a matter of concern” and “against government policy.”
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This story has been updated to correct that Tamba's killing occurred Sunday, not Saturday.