New Delhi | Jagran News Desk: The Pakistan government has dropped the names of close to 4,000 terrorists from its Terror Watch List – 1,800 from the beginning of March, 2020, as the world looked the other way to solve the coronavirus crisis, a report by New York-based Artificial intelligence start-up ‘Castellum.AI’ which automates the watch list compliance, revealed.

One of the removed names is that of the 2008 Mumbai attack (26/11) mastermind and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operations commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. The hardened terrorist was recorded as commanding the terror operation at Mumbai’s iconic Taj Hotel through satellite phones from his terror control room in Karachi.

The list in 2018 contained about 7,600 names. It has been reduced to under 3,800 in the past 18 months, news agency PTI reported.

According to a report by Wall Street Journal, the removals as they happened were not followed by any clarification – however, the report quotes a Pakistani official that these removals are part of the country's ongoing efforts ‘to comply with a commitment to strengthen its counter-terrorism safeguards’.

However, Pakistan's Countering the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) lead, has provided no explanation for removal of the names, news agency IANS reported.

"Removing close to 4,000 names without a public explanation is unheard of and it raises significant questions about the listing process," Peter Piatetsky, co-founder of Castellum.AI told Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, Pakistan remains under the constant scrutiny of Paris-based financial watchdog (FATF) Financial Action Task Force since June 2018. Pakistan was due to submit its performance report on 13 outstanding benchmarks for leak-proof arrangements against money laundering and terror financing in plenary’s Beijing session in June 2020.

However, due to coronavirus crisis – the June session of FATF has been postponed and country’s anti-terror compliance is scheduled to be reviewed in October, 2020. Pakistan is under FATF’s grey list since June 2018 due to its track-record of exporting terror to India and rest of the world.

The country has to show compliance on remaining 13 of 27 parameters set upon by the FATF, if it is to avoid itself from entering the list of monitored jurisdiction, commonly known as the watchdog’s Blacklist.

 

(With Agencies Inputs)