India at UN, as it pushes to get TRF listed as terror outfit

As New Delhi intensified efforts to get The Resistance Front (TRF), a front of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), to get it listed as a terror outfit, an Indian delegation has met officials of the United Nation’s Security Council’s 1267 Sanctions Committee in New York.

Official sources said an Indian technical team is in New York interacting with the Monitoring Team of the committee and other partner countries in the UN. They will also meet representatives of the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT) and Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED).

Indian officials had said that the TRF, which had claimed responsibility for the Pahalgam terror attack of April 22, that killed 26 people, retracted the claim on the directions of its handlers across the border. This is the first time that India has raised the matter at the UN, after the Pahalgam terrorist attack.

Last year, India had given inputs to the Monitoring Team of the UN’s 1267 sanctions Committee, which is tasked with managing and updating sanctions lists and monitoring and supporting implementation of sanctions regimes, on TRF’s role as a front for terrorist groups in Pakistan. The team, which is a member of the Working Group on Tackling the Financing of Terrorism and works closely with partners such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), assists the 1267 Sanctions Committee with freezing financial assets of designated terrorist individuals and entities, preventing entry into or transit through a member state’s territory by designated individuals and the supply of arms to designated individuals or entities.

After the Pahalgam massacre, the UN Security Council issued a press release condemning the terrorist attack. It, however, did not mention TRF as the group responsible for it.

On the night of May 7, India targeted terror infrastructure inside Pakistan carrying out Operation Sindoor in retaliation to the Pahalgam terror attack. After four days of escalation between the two countries, an understanding was reached on May 10 for cessation of military action.

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