Pakistan asks UNSC for deletion of terrorists names from watch list

The Pakistan government told a visiting team of a UNSC (United States Security Council) monitoring committee that, as the UN panel had provided it with insufficient information about six terrorists sanctioned by the world’s security panel and hence were unable act against the individuals listed. 

Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government has approached the UNSC to delete names of the terrorists from the list. 

Islamabad confirmed that only 19 of the 130 terrorists sanctioned by the UNSC are in Pakistan. Diplomats in Delhi have been quoted in the Hindustan Times as saying that China will back Pakistan’s efforts in deletion of the names. 

For years, China had blocked an Indian-led international effort to designate chief of the Jaish-e-Mohammad terror group Masood Azhar as a global terrorist.

A long-time ally of Pakistan, Bejing eventually gave in last year after the Pulwama attack led by the Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 40 CRPF troopers. 

Later, China, in an attempt to make up to Pakistan, supported Islamabad’s effort to get four Indian professionals working in Afghanistan designated as terrorists under the UN Security Council’s 1267 Al Qaida sanctions. 

The Indian government, however, managed to evacuate the four Indians from Afghanistan over apprehensions that Pakistan could abduct them and claim to arrest them from its territory. 

Former-Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav was abducted from Iran and turned up in the custody of Pakistani security agencies, and was sentenced to death. Jadhav is still in a Pakistan jail despite the International Court of Justice verdict last year that asked Islamabad to have the sentence reviewed by an independent body. 

When the Financial Action Task Force asked Pakistan about the deletion of 3,800 names from its domestic terror watch list, Pakistan put out a similar set of explanations. Pakistan had shown the list to FATF in October 2018, to demonstrate that it was coming down heavily on terrorists. As per FATF records, this list then had 7,600 terrorist names. 

A New York-based tech firm Castellum AI that tracks watch lists globally was the one that first spotted around 800 names were removed after March 27. Indian counterterror officials maintain that Pakistan’s efforts to prune its terror watch list is recent. 

Indian diplomats feel that Pakistan evading FATF’s blacklist has a lot to do with Beijing’s influence. 

Islamabad has been in FATF’s grey list since 2018 for not doing enough to counter the raising of funds by terror groups such as al-Qaeda, Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. 

Pakistan, since then, has missed several deadlines to implement the action plan. But, it has evaded being blacklisted. According to one diplomat, president of FATF has been Xiangmin Liu from China’s since 1 July 2019. And this has helped Islamabad getaway by doing less.

From the 19 names accepted by Pakistan to be on its soil, only two have been convicted—Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed and associate Malik Zafar Iqbal.