The Pakistan government, which actively sponsors Islamic terrorism, has now told a visiting team of a United Nations Security Council monitoring committee that it cant trace the terrorists listed by UN because it does not have sufficient information to track them, reports Hindustan Times.
According to the report, Pakistan has said that it cannot against numerous terrorists listed in its sanctions list because the UN panel had given “insufficient information”. Islamabad said this while a UNSC monitoring committee had come for a visit to the country. The UNSC sanctions list has the name of 130 Pakistani nationals.
Deletion of 4,000 names from terror watch
This comes in the backdrop of a recent decision of Imran Khan govt in Pakistan to delete nearly 4,000 names from its terror watch list to change its image in front of the United Nations Security Council. The ‘insufficient information’ explanation for deleting nearly 4,000 names from domestic terror watch-list was also given when the UNSC team had arrived for a five-day visit in March.
The Pakistan government said to the UN analytical support and sanctions monitoring team that they did not have the accurate date of birth, nationality, national ID number, passport number or a specific address of the men sanctioned for their terror links.
A total of 130 names from the UNSC 1267 Sanctions List are from Pakistan, whereas the country has acknowledged only 19 of them including the Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed. The Pakistan government has also asked to delist six terrorists from the list.
Pakistan had deleted names of 1,069 terrorists in 2018
In October 2018, Pakistan showed off the same list to the FATF to escape being grey-listed. The list then had 7,600 names in it. The deletion of names was first noticed by a New-York based tech firm, Castellum AI, it tracks global terror watch list. They said that few names were deleted after October 2018. About 1,069 names were deleted between March 9 to 27 and another 800 were deleted on March 27.
The deletion of the names is seen as desperation to stay out of FATF blacklist as they currently are on the grey list for terror financing. The FATF review meeting for Pakistan has been postponed for four months due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Top terrorist leaders who are designated by the UNSC such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s chief operations commander and 26/11 Mumbai attacks mastermind Zaki ur Rehmani Lakhvi have been left out of Pakistan’s terror list. Even Dawood Ibrahim and others terrorists such as Mohammed Yahya Mujahid, head of LeT’s media department and LeT co-founder and Hafiz Saeed’s deputy Hafiz Abdul Salam Bhuttavi are also out of Pakistan’s terror list.