Ahmedabad: On camera, a senior officer of the Coast Guard in Gujarat, says, “I hope you remember the 31st December night. We blew off the Pakistan…we blew them off.” The officer, who is in uniform, goes on to say, “I was there at Gandhinagar and I told at night ‘blow the boat off…we don’t want to serve them biryani’.”

The officer, BK Loshali said today those remarks, made at an event on Monday, have been misconstrued to suggest that he ordered the blowing up of a Pakistani fishing boat which sank, killing all four people on board on New Year’s Eve. “I have been misquoted, the boat actually set itself on fire and sunk,” he was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.  He claimed that his remarks were meant to warn that “We will not allow any foreign elements to breach our borders.” At a press conference, he stressed, “I am not privy to what was happening at the ground that day.”
 
Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar refused today to comment on the controversy. 
 
The clarifications by the Coast Guard were necessitated after The Indian Express reported on the remarks as a clear contradiction of the government’s earlier claim – that the crew had blown up the vessel after ignoring calls to stop and allow a search after it was flagged as a suspicious vessel by intelligence agencies.

On January 1, a statement by the Defence Ministry said that intelligence agencies had warned that the fishing boat, which was loaded with explosives, had set sail from near Karachi in Pakistan and was planning “an illicit transaction” in the Arabian Sea when it was intercepted. The government statement did not elaborate on the type of explosives or who they were intended for. The Indian Coast Guard chased the Pakistani boat for almost an hour and fired warning shots before it stopped, and the crew then hid below deck and then set the boat on fire, the government had claimed.