New Delhi: In all likelihood, a fourth bid to declare Jaish-E-Mohammed Chief Masood Azhar will be made soon.
After the demonic Pulwama attack, France has decided to move a proposal at the United Nations to ban the head of JeM, the terror outfit, which has claimed responsibility for the Pulwama terror attack in which scores of CRPF troopers were martyred on Thursday last week.
It may be recalled that three efforts were made in the past ten years to declare Masood Azhar as ‘global terrorist’. In 2009 and 2016, India moved the UN’s Sanctions Committee to ban Azhar, who was also the mastermind behind the air base attack in Pathankot in January 2016.
India was joined by P3 countries –the US, the UK and France– in the 2016 proposal. In 2017, these P3 countries moved a similar proposal at the United Nations. However, China has always blocked the proposal from being adopted by the UN.
“At the UN, France will lead a proposal to put Masood Azhar on the terrorist list… It will happen in a couple of days,” a senior French source was quoted by PTI.
The French sources also told PTI that the country will insist on maintaining Pakistan on the “grey list” of countries at the ongoing meet of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in Paris. Pakistan was placed on the FATF grey list in June 2018 and put on notice to be blacklisted by October 2019 if it did not curb money laundering and terror financing.
