How missile piece displayed by India exposes Pakistan's F-16 fabrication
IAF personnel displaying evidence of Pakistan's disinformation. - Bir Bahadur Yadav
India on Thursday evening cleared the fog of war off another piece of Pakistan's disinformation surrounding the ongoing stand-off. At a joint services press conference, the Indian military displayed a piece of a missile that is used on F-16 fighter jets of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF). The display of the evidence is clear proof that PAF used the fighter jets for its incursion into India and also that it fire that particular missile at fighter jets of the Indian Air Force (IAF).
Pakistan had earlier denied that it had used its F-16s in the attempted attack on Indian military facilities on Wednesday. This was presumably a bid to cover up the fact that a PAF F-16, as the IAF had earlier said.
It is now evident that the PAF F-16 that was either an F-16D Block 50/52+ or an F-16B Block 15 MLU. The 'B' and 'D' variants of the F-16 that are twin-seater. India had said soon after the Pakistani attack that two parachutes had been witnessed ejecting from the hit aircraft and descending on the Pakistani side of the Line of Control (LoC).
The evidence presented by the Indian military was a piece of the fuselage of the AIM 120C-5 AMRAAM, which stands for Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile. It is a beyond-visual-range fire-and-forget guided missile.
The identification of that piece of missile fuselage as Pakistani would be aided by the fact that details of its manufacture and contract were intact on the recovered fragment. The missile fragment was recovered from the Indian side of the LoC, east of Rajouri.
The markings on the missile fuselage fragment read as follows:
AIM-120C-5
SERNO CC12497
82577-3819625-104
MFR 15090
CONTRACT ACT FA8675-05-C-0070
GUIDED MISSILE, A AV'
The PAF had in 2007 placed an order for 500 AIM-120C-5 AMRAAM missiles as part of a $650 million deal to equip its F-16C/D and F-16A/B fleet. PAF took its first delivery of the AMRAAM missiles on in July 2010. US arms giant Raytheon, the manufacturer of the missile, had at the time termed the Pakistani purchase the "largest single international AMRAAM purchase" in a press release.