Some foreign spy agencies financing terrorism, says Nisar

At least 498 cases have been registered across the country under the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act

ISLAMABAD: Though the government said it cannot pinpoint with 100 per cent accuracy the funding sources for terrorism, it is sure that some foreign intelligence agencies were among those funding groups that are creating instability in Pakistan, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said on Thursday.

His remarks were in response to a question raised by Senator Chaudhry Tanvir Khan of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) in the Senate.



Cash obtained via extortionists is a major source of terror funding. The minister maintained that militants were known to “extort funds from drug dealers and opium growers operating in areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border”.

Sharing details of action against such elements, the minister stated that at least 498 cases had been registered across the country under the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act.

Some 230 cases had also been registered under the Anti Money Laundering (AML) Act, 2010, while 116 cases had been registered on suspicious transaction reports (STRs) on the orders of the ministry’s financial monitoring unit.

Highlighting steps taken by the government, the minister stated that it had recently shared a list of persons placed on the fourth schedule of the Anti Terrorism Act, 1997, along with their CNIC numbers with instructions to freeze their bank accounts. Subsequently, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) froze 4,461 bank accounts.

All reporting entities are legally bound to send financial intelligence to the FMU under the AML Act, 2010 in all cases where there is a suspicion that funds are related to terrorist activities or related organisations. The minister recalled that the National Action Plan also talked about blocking funding to such persons and bodies.

Terrorism report

Separately, the minister told the Senate that since 2013 at least 4,613 people had been killed in 5,321 terror-related incidents across the country -- a clear decline in the number of incidents and casualties over the past four years.



The data was shared on a question raised by Senator Sehar Kamran.

There were 1,571 incidents of terrorism with 1,794 deaths in 2013. The number of such incidents increased in 2014 – 1,816 – but there were fewer deaths – 1,172. Terror-related incidents drastically fell last year to 785 with just 804 deaths. So far, there have been 10 such cases with five deaths.

Govt’s ads

Information and Broadcasting Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb told the Senate that since 2013, the government had spent Rs12 billion on advertisements to print and electronic media. An amount of Rs8.13 billion was released to the print media and Rs3.62 billion to the electronic media.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 20^th, 2017.