Interior minister says 105m CNICs to be re-verified in 6 months. A file photo of Taliban chief Mullah Akhter Mansoor.
According to him, all persons involved in facilitating Mansoor to acquire a computerised national identity card (CNIC) of Pakistan have been arrested. He said the NADRA official, who retired in 2007, was arrested because he had actually issued the CNIC to Mansoor under the name of Wali Muhammad in 2002 as an assistant director. “Currently, four NADRA officials are in detention,” he added.
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Mansoor was killed in the May 21 US drone strike in the Naushki district of Balochistan.
The interior minister said he would opt to start the process of registering millions of Afghan refugees if they repatriated to Afghanistan or went back to refugee camps. Expressing apprehension about the registration of Afghan refugees, he admitted that in many cases, the refugees had been well-integrated in local society.
Currently, there are 1.5 to 2 million unregistered Afghan refugees in Pakistan. “You can’t (just) pick them up and toss them across the border. We are getting no response from the Afghan government,” he lamented. Starting the registration process would mean nothing else but to hand them over another document, allowing them to prolong their stay in Pakistan, the minister added.
Nisar said there was another option under consideration: to send aliens with fake CNICs across the border. He also said that any foreigner found involved in criminal activity would be deported.
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He said there were more than three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan in addition to illegal immigrants from Burma and Bangladesh, which complicated matters for authorities concerned.
He said the government had blocked 250,000 suspected CNICs while the figure in this context during the tenure of the PPP government was nominal, adding that not a single CNIC had been blocked during the regime of Pervez Musharraf. He said the current government had also black-listed 29,000 passports. Terming the task of re-verifying 105 million CNICs in the next six months herculean, Nisar said NADRA should also be ‘cleaned up’ because the authority and corruption could not go together. He said the number of Directors-General (DGs) of NADRA had been reduced from 26 to 10.
He said the NADRA employees who helped aliens get CNICs would be given amnesty provided they disclose the wrongdoings in the next two months. Moreover, any citizen who helped in identifying aliens possessing illegal CNIC would be given a cash reward of Rs10,000.
Nisar said he was also working out a plan in collaboration with the SAFRON ministry to offer monetary incentive for aliens who surrendered their CNICs voluntarily during this exercise.
Published in The Express Tribune, June 1st, 2016.
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