ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has decided that not more than two SIMs per NIC allowed for all foreigners, including Afghan refugees.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has decided to block all the SIMs exceeding this limit, which will help curb the involvement of Afghan nationals in terrorist activities.
“There will be a limit of two SIMs per ID (passport, proof of registration and Non Alien Registration Authority (NARA) for foreigners against individual category from now onwards,” official documents of the regulator available with The News disclosed.
A separate procedure will be issued for clearing/streamlining of previous SIMs issued against the foreign ID, the PTA stated. The sources said that in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the Army Public School (APS), Peshawar, all political parties as well as the Pakistan Army devised the National Action Plan (NAP) to root out terrorism and extremism.
The government devised a strategy to verify 103 million SIMs through BVS in three months ending April 13, 2015. The first phase of the exercise was completed on February 26, 2015. In the second phase unverified SIMs will be verified and un-verified would be blocked in a phased manner. When contacted, PTA’s Member Compliance and Enforcement Abdul Samad confirmed that the PTA has imposed restrictions of 2 SIMs per ID for foreigners. The PTA, he said, would devise strategy to streamline all those SIMs in excess of this limit.
To a query, he said that more than 66 millions SIMs were verified through biometric verification system while more than 11 million SIMs were blocked because no one owned them. PTA will look after the media campaign for phase 2 for BVS exercise. The BVS re-verification of all types of post-paid numbers shall be ensured by Cellular Mobile Operators (CMO).
The compliance of BVS on any new activity against post-paid numbers (new SIM sale, change of ownership, duplicate) will also be ensured by CMOs. It was also observed that some CMOs were not complying with the standard operating procedures of PTA in certain cases.
