India says Pakistan must continue to act against terrorism

Though Pakistan has been taken off the ‘grey list’ of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), India on Friday called upon the international community to keep pressing the South Asian Islamic Republic to continue to take actions to stop the flow of funds to terrorist organisations.

"It is in global interest that the world remains clear that Pakistan must continue to take credible, verifiable, irreversible and sustained action against terrorism and terrorist financing emanating from territories under its control," Arindam Bagchi, the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, said in New Delhi.

Pakistan is no longer subject to the FATF’s increased monitoring process, T Raja Kumar, the president of the intergovernmental organisation, earlier said in Paris, where the intergovernmental organisation held a plenary session from Monday to Friday.

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The FATF had in 2018 put Pakistan on its "grey list" – officially a list of "jurisdictions with strategic deficiencies in legal regime to check money laundering and terrorist financing".

The Government of Pakistan took four years to upgrade the nation’s legal mechanism to stop the flow of funds to terror organisations.

"The FATF welcomes Pakistan’s significant progress in improving its AML/CFT (anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism) regime," Raja Kumar said in Paris.

"Pakistan has strengthened the effectiveness of its AML/CFT regime and addressed technical deficiencies to meet the commitments of its action plans regarding strategic deficiencies that the FATF identified in June 2018 and June 2021, the latter of which was completed in advance of the deadlines, encompassing 34 action items in total," he added.

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New Delhi took note of the FATF’s decision and pointed out that the scrutiny by the intergovernmental organisation over the past four years forced Islamabad to take "some action against well-known terrorists, including those involved in the attacks against the entire international community in Mumbai on 26/11 (November 26-28, 2008 attacks),"

The Lashkar-e-Tayyiba founder Hafiz Saeed and its ‘commander’ Zaki ur Rehman Lakhvi were convicted in terror financing cases in 2020 and 2021 respectively. Both Saeed and Lakhvi had played key roles in organising the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai but had never been convicted by the courts in Pakistan for being involved in the attacks in India.

The FATF scrutiny forced Pakistan’s law-enforcement organisations to initiate legal proceedings against Saeed and Lakhvi, who were sentenced to imprisonment for 33 years and five years respectively.

"We understand that Pakistan will continue to work with the Asia Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) to further improve its Anti Money Laundering (AML) /Counter Terror Financing (CFT) system," the MEA spokesperson said in New Delhi.