(PTI) By Shishir Gupta

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. This terror watch list, according to FATF records, then had 7,600 names of terrorists.

Indian counterterror officials suggested that the effort to prune Pakistan’s terror watch list is a more recent development.

The deletions were first spotted by Castellum AI, a New York-headquartered tech firm that tracks watch lists globally. In a statement in April, the tech firm started by a former US treasury department official said many of the names were removed sometime after October 2018. But there were about 1,069 names in the watch list that were deleted between March 9-27. Another 800 names were removed after March 27.

“This means the process to delete the names started the day the UNSC monitoring team landed in Pakistan,” a counterterror operative told Hindustan Times. The UNSC monitoring team was in Pakistan from March 9-13.