Pakistan blocks 937 web addresses to curb terrorist activities

(Representational Picture)

Islamabad: Pakistan has blocked 937 web addresses and 10 websites run by banned organisations as part of measures to prevent the use of the Internet and social media for terrorist activities. The Ministry of Information Technology took action under the National Action Plan (NAP) adopted in early 2015 to eliminate militancy from the country after the 2014 Peshawar school attack in which nearly 150 people, mostly school children, were killed. Dawn newspaper reported that it carried out research across the country in the month of April 2017 which revealed that 41 of Pakistan's 64 banned outfits were present on Facebook in the form of hundreds of pages, groups and individual user profiles. Their network, both interconnected and public, is a mix of Sunni and Shia sectarian or terror outfits, global terror organisations operating in Pakistan, and separatists in Balochistan and Sindh. However, there appears to have been very little overall progress in the NAP in the last three months, as figures of the implementation report released in September are only slightly different than the latest report, the paper said. The interior ministry's report showed that apart from blocking of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URLs), the government registered 1,351 cases, arrested 2,525 people and sealed 70 shops in an effort to counter hate speech and extremist material. The government also blocked a total of 98.3 million SIMs to curb use of mobile phones in militant activities. It also introduced biometric verification system to issue SIMS cards. It dismantled communication networks of terrorists. To curb the misuse of loudspeakers by clerics, the government registered 17,616 cases, arrested 18,308 suspects and seized 7,942 pieces of equipment.