Pakistan returns Most Wanted list to India

The Pakistani interior ministry has reportedly rejected India?s 50 Most Wanted fugitives list after bloopers surfaced in the listing.

The Pak interior ministry has sent back the list to the foreign ministry after reviewing the names of fugitives.

Along with the list, the interior ministry attached a letter saying India should first probe if more people featured in the list have been living in the country, said media reports on Wednesday.

The foreign ministry will hand over the list to Indian high commissioner in Pakistan in a couple of days.

Earlier, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram said he does not owe anyone apology on the goof-ups in 50 Most Wanted List handed over to Pakistan, but regrets the bloopers.

?I don’t think this is a case where we owe anyone an apology. If we owe an apology, if we owe a regret, it’s the regret that we have expressed – that there is a genuine human error in not updating the list. To that extent, I think, we have expressed regret and we remain regretful,? Chidambaram told Karan Thapar on Devil’s Advocate.

The minister said the goof-ups are an embarrassment to the Home Ministry.

?Obviously, it embarrasses the Ministry of Home Affairs. We rely on the lists given by the CBI which is the Interpol’s National Crime Division. They maintain the list of most wanted against whom red-corner notices are given.

?Please remember, both mistakes occurred in one part of the list, namely the Red Corner notices and that is a list prepared by the CBI. It is embarrassing, it is regrettable. Since the list was handed over formally by the Home Secretary, we have taken, what I would call constructive responsibility,? he said.

The Indian Home Ministry on May 21 directed all states, union territories and investigating agencies to update their list of the most wanted fugitives every three months after the recent spree of gaffes sprouting from the lists, left the government egg-faced.

The Home Ministry has already directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to scrutinize, verify and revise the list, a top official said on May 20.

“The Home Ministry has directed the CBI, IB and NIA to coordinate with each other and prepare a revised and correct list after authentication. After it is prepared, we may send it to Pakistan,” the official told media on conditions of anonymity.

A dead HuJI member and a Northeast militant leader are the two more latest errors that tumbled out of the CBI and Indian Home Ministry’s Most Wanted List.

The errors came after two similar errors were spotted in the list of 50 most wanted fugitives sent to Pakistan by India to search within its own borders. One of the ‘fugitives’ was found to be residing in a Mumbai locality, and the other one in a Mumbai prison.

Consequent discoveries of embarrassing bloopers in the past few days on the list of Indian offenders hiding in Pakistan embarassed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and they took off their Most Wanted list from their website.

On May 16, “Most Wanted” Wazhul Khan was found residing in Mumbai though his name featured in the list sent to Pakistan. Three days later another wanted person named Feroze Ahmad Rashid Khan was found in a Mumbai jail.

Indian home minister P Chidambaram has admitted the lapses, but the livid Opposition slammed the government for trivializing the fight against terror and offering Pakistan a weapon to deny India’s contention on terrorists hiding in that country.