Pakistan’s claims on most-wanted Dawood Ibrahim and 26/11-accused Zakir-ur-Rehman Lakhvi have been called out by Indian intelligence agencies.
India now has evidence that Pakistan never mentioned the facts in any official document till August 18, 2020. Agencies state that the 2020 Statutory Regulatory Order (SRO) is the first time Dawood’s details have been published by Pakistan, sources said.
An examination of the technical back-end of the 2015 and 2019 SROs shows that it was uploaded later and back-dated.
“The move puts Pakistan in the dock as the sovereign country is lying. The evidence will be put forth by India in the upcoming FATF (Financial Action Task Force) meet in September,” sources said.
If what Pakistan claims as per the information provided previously was true, then it would have mentioned the same during all meetings of the task force and it would have subsequently reflected in FATF documents.
The Internet Archive project made its first pass at Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (MOFA) UNSC sanctions web page in December 2019. However, snapshots from December 12 say that the URL was not found.
The second snapshot on Wayback machine on January 11, 2020, does not list the SRO order dated November 26, 2019, but has the other relevant SROs from 2015 and 2017. Another snapshot from February 9, 2020, does list the SRO dated November 26, 2019.
Incidentally, the URL of the PDF files indicates when they may have been uploaded.
For example, this year’s SRO issued on August 18 has a reference to “2020/08” in its link. Similarly, a fraction of the URL of another SRO dated May 22 states ‘2020/05’ as the upload date.
However, the majority of SROs, from December 22, 2015, to January 16, 2020, had a reference to ‘2020/01’ in their URLs. This includes the December 2015 and July 2017 SRO issued by Pakistan foreign office, which had mentioned Dawood Ibrahim and Lakhvi in their annexure.
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