
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's government has decided to delete nearly 4,000 names from its terror watch list to change its image in front of the United Nations Security Council.
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. Pak government has asked to delist six terrorists.
The government has blamed the UN panel for they could not take action against individuals under UNSC sanction as it had provided 'insufficient information'. Islamabad blamed this while a UNSC monitoring committee team had come for a visit.
The 'insufficient information' explanation for deleting 3,800 names from domestic terror watch-list was similar when the UNSC team arrived for a five-day visit.
In October 2018, Pakistan showed off the same list to the FATF to escape being grey-listed. The list then had 7,600 names to 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.