Pakistan hands over Indian pilot captured amid Kashmir tensions

Islamabad says handover is gesture of peace to defuse tensions and avoid another war between two nuclear powers

Pakistan has handed over a captured Indian pilot, as the two nuclear powers scale back their confrontation.

Pakistani TV footage showed the pilot, identified as Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, walking across the Kashmir border near the town of Wagah just before 9pm local time.

On the Indian side of the border, Indian officials greeted the pilot, who was dressed in a dark blue suit, accompanied by a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Islamabad has said the handover was a gesture of peace that could defuse tensions and avoid another war between the two nations.

Mr Varthaman was shot down on Wednesday while flying a MiG-21 fighter jet above Pakistan-controlled Kashmir after a dog fight with a Pakistani JF-17.

Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said earlier on Friday the pilot would be released “as a gesture of peace and to de-escalate matters”.

Before the pilot was released, Pakistani television stations broadcast a video of him, looking cleaned up, thanking the Pakistani army for treating him well.

“The Pakistani army is a very professional service,” he said.

Throughout the day, crowds on the Indian side thronged the road to the crossing, shouting nationalist slogans and waving Indian flags.

Also on Friday, Pakistan’s civil aviation authority partially reopened the country’s airspace, allowing travel to four major cities, in another sign tensions with India were de-escalating.

There was some firing along the contested border dividing Kashmir over the day, according to a spokesman for India’s defence ministry, but the hostilities fell short of previous days.

World powers have urged restraint from the two nations, as tensions escalated following a suicide bombing that killed at least 40 Indian paramilitary police in Indian-controlled Kashmir on 14 February.

The US has been actively mediating, to avert any risk of the two countries sliding towards their fourth war since independence from British colonial rule in 1947.

The disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir has been at the root of two of those conflicts.