5 Indian nationals detained in China handed over: Indian army
13 September, 2020
Five Indian nationals from a remote eastern state who was simply detained by Chinese authorities on a region bordering Tibet were paid to Indian authorities about Saturday (Sep 12), the Indian army said.
"Individuals will now come to be quarantined for 14 days as per COVID-19 protocol and can thereafter be handed over to their members of the family," Lieutenant Colonel Harsh Wardhan Pande, a good spokesman for the Indian army, explained in a statement.
Pande said the five youths had "inadvertently strayed" across the de facto border even while foraging and hunting, adding that two other such incidents had occurred this year in India's Arunachal Pradesh talk about, which borders China.
However, a Chinese state-supported tabloid explained the five were Indian intelligence agents dressed simply because hunters, disputing claims that that they had been kidnapped.
Bilateral relations have been unusually tense since a clash at a disputed border area on June that killed 20 Indian soldiers, with an unidentified number of Chinese casualties.
On Tuesday, following information that five Indians from the condition of Arunachal Pradesh had opted missing, an Indian minister said that the Chinese People's Liberation Army confirmed that they had been within China.
Their disappearance coincided with a border confrontation that week in the western Himalayas, where both accused the other of firing in the air.
Both sides have long observed a protocol avoiding the use of firearms in the undemarcated frontier, though violence has erupted during the past.
On Thursday, Chinese State Councillor Wang Yi and Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar met in Moscow and decided to de-escalate the border tensions.
Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin said over the Chinese Twitter-like iphone app Weibo that China-India relations were stabilising. Observers of China's foreign relations sometimes watch Hu's text messages on social media to gauge sentiment from Beijing policymakers.
"It appears that the successive meetings between your Chinese and Indian defence ministers and foreign ministers have played a positive role found in cooling the problem," Hu wrote.
"Furthermore, the People's Liberation Army defended every inches of the country's property, and the Indian Army finally failed to take good thing about it."
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