Pakistan International Airlines spokesperson Mashood Tajwer confirmed Friday that the national flag carrier would start a new weekly flight between Lahore and Delhi in November.
According to media reports, the new Lahore-Delhi flight would double the number of weekly flights between Pakistan and India, since only one weekly flight had been operating between the two countries since May.
An earlier weekly flight between Karachi and Mumbai was suspended earlier in May, allegedly for commercial reasons according to former PIA spokesperson Danyal Gillani, who said that the traffic had declined along the route.
However, the cancellation of the former weekly flight had come about amid high tension between the two countries over the Kashmir issue. It may, thus, have been not the result of “commercial” reasons purely.
Tensions between the Pakistan and India mounted when Burhan Wani, a young leader of a Kashmir separatist group, was killed earlier in July. They further rose following Delhi’s accusations that Islamabad was training, arming and infiltrating militants into Kashmir, an allegation that Pakistan has denied many times.
