Hindustan Times (Amritsar)

Can’t locate listed terrorists: Pak to UNSC committee

- Shishir Gupta letters@hindustant­imes.com ■

NEW DELHI: The decision by Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government to delete nearly 4,000 names from its terror watch list was part of a well-orchestrat­ed effort to scrub its terror record clean not just at home, but also at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), people familiar with the developmen­ts told Hindustan Times.

Islamabad has told a visiting team of a UNSC monitoring committee that it had been unable to act against numerous individual­s listed in its sanctions list because the UN panel had given “insufficie­nt informatio­n”.

The UNSC 1267 Sanctions List has 130 names from Pakistan.

Islamabad, however, acknowledg­es the presence of only 19 of them including Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed. It has already moved the UNSC to delist 6 terrorists including Matiur Rehman, described in UN records of 2013 as the chief operationa­l commander of terror group Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, a top official in North Block that houses India’s internal security establishm­ent said.

The UN analytical support and sanctions monitoring team, which was on a five-day visit to Pakistan in March, was told that the UN Sanctions List 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. Pakistan had put out a similar set of explanatio­ns when it was asked about the deletion of 3,800 names from its domestic terror watch list.

In October 2018, Islamabad showed off this list to the counterter­ror financing watchdog Financial Action Task Force to demonstrat­e that it was coming down heavily on terrorists.

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