ECP unable to check if candidates have terror ties

Screening made harder by lack of mechanism

ISLAMABAD : The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has no mechanism to determine if any person placed on the Fourth Schedule list (for suspicion or involvement in terrorist activities) was contesting the upcoming general election.

The commission, it is learnt, has not yet approached the National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) which has the consolidated data in this regard.

Moreover, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), which is involved in scrutinizing prospective candidates on some matters, has also not been taken into the loop about names on the Fourth Schedule.

Despite repeated attempts by this correspondent, Chief Election Commissioner Justice (retd) Sardar Muhmmad Raza did not respond for comments.



Meanwhile, NACTA chief Ihsan Ghani blamed the provincial home departments, saying that they had the most updated data in this regard.

“Provincial election commissioners may have obtained relevant data,” Ghani said.

An ECP official, who did not want to be named, blamed the FIA for this state of affairs.

“If someone’s name is on the Fourth Schedule list, it is not possible that FIA does not know about it. The FIA is part of online scrutiny,” the official told this correspondent.

However, it is learnt that a meeting between ECP and NACTA official was scheduled, but the meeting’s agenda was to determine security threats against some candidates.

But an FIA official said that the authority had not yet been directed to guide the election commission about individuals on the Fourth Schedule list.



“FIA has data on persons already placed on the Fourth Schedule list and it also knows which persons were wanted by law. During the 2013 general election, FIA was not asked to guide the ECP so some individuals listed on the Fourth Schedule list managed to dodge the system,” he stated.

Any individual with known or suspected links with a proscribed organization can be proscribed by the home department of a province, slapping various restrictions.

After the home department issued a notification, such individual’s name was included in the Fourth Schedule under the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997.

According to NACTA data as of May 7 this year, as many as 7,779 individuals have been proscribed across the country.

At least 4,808 bank accounts of people on the Fourth Schedule had been frozen.



Interestingly, most people on the Fourth Schedule are from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa or Punjab, who are mostly wanted in cases of sectarian nature.

Most of the time an individual’s name was placed on the Fourth Schedule list on the recommendations of district or provincial police authorities, who constantly monitor their whereabouts.

During the 2013 polls, some individuals who were on the Fourth Schedule not only contested election, but some of them won their seats too.