Four Daesh terrorists also named in 8th edition of Red Book

The Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) of Sindh has announced the eighth addition of the Red Book that includes the names of four Daesh terrorists.

The Red Book, which has been issued by Additional Inspector General Sanaullah Abbasi of the CTD, contains the names of wanted terrorists, especially in Sindh, in a number of cases of acts of terrorism, including suicide attacks. 

Talking to The News on Friday, a senior official of the anti-terrorism department said Pakistan was in a state of war and facing internal and external threats, including the challenge of terrorism. 

Keeping in view the bomb blasts, suicide attacks and bids to destabilise national security, it had been decided to upgrade the Red Book by including the names of terrorists who were working against the state, he added.

The official stated that the latest addition of the Red Book had been finalised two years after the release of the seventh one. The CTD had upgraded it by including the names of terrorists associated with international terrorist organisation ISIS and had excluded the names of those terrorists who had been either killed or arrested.

Names of activists of political parties and militants belonging to nationalist parties had been excluded from the list, the official said and added that they had also excluded the names of those suspects whose names had been mentioned in the book on suspicion.

Now, he said, names of terrorists belonging to banned organisations, including the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Lashker-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and Sipah-e-Mohammad, were part of the list.

The latest addition contains the names of 72 terrorists, including four from ISIS. The four Daesh terrorists are Mehmood (codename) with reward money of Rs2.5 million; Abdullah Yousuf with a bounty of Rs2.5 million; Zeeshan, a close associate of Abdullah Yousuf who went to Syria with him (his brother Arman Naveed was also a terrorist who was killed in a drone strike in 2015 in Afghanistan and had earlier been running the network of Daesh); and Sharmeela Pathan (codename), also a notorious terrorist.

The book has the names of nine terrorists of al-Qaeda, 17 terrorists of the TTP, nine of the LeJ, and 11 terrorists of Jundullah, four of them notified. 

The official said that the second part of the book contains the names of 21 terrorists belonging to banned Shia organisations, including Sipah-e-Mohammad and Mehdi Force.

The book includes details of terrorists carrying head money announced by the federal government. These terrorists are wanted in the former prime minister attack case, the Musharraf attack case, the Safoora attack case and bomb blast cases reported across the country, including Sindh.

The official said the basic aim of issuing the book was to develop information about terrorists involved in terrorism acts and to share the info with the CTDs of Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan so that joint efforts could be made to eliminate the terrorists working against the state.

Earlier, Additional IG Sanaullah Abbasi said he was trying to revamp the structure of the CTD in order to make it a completely independent institution, which “works without any influence”. 

Moreover, he said, they were preparing their own database, which contained information of all terrorists and criminals operating within Pakistan, especially in Sindh, and also upgrading it with intelligence and investigation reports.

Abbasi said that at present the CTD Sindh was working on two tools — the hard tool and soft tool.

The hard tool, he said, pertained to arrests and operations against militants or terrorists who were hardcore and wanted by the police in terrorism and killing cases. The soft tool, he said, related to working on people who were on the 4th Schedule and involved in money laundering or working as facilitators.