Islamabad: Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has requested the interior ministry to carry out an audit of the biometric verification campaign ended on April 12.
“We have written a letter to the Ministry of Interior to appoint officials, who would visit the mobile operators’ offices along with PTA experts to carry out an audit of the whole process,” said an official adding, the purpose of this audit would be to verify the claims of mobile operators that they had biometrically verified SIMs and blocked those which could not be verified.
After the expiry of three-month deadline, the PTA on Sunday announced the ending of the biometric verification campaign.
The authority also publicised that mobile phone companies had started blocking around 10 million unverified SIMs from Monday and the process of blocking unverified SIMs would be completed in two days.
The PTA also stated that around 78 million SIMs had been verified against 60,496,307 computerised national identity cards, out of total 103 million unverified SIMs, during the campaign.
The verification was initiated by the government under the National Action Plan after the Peshawar Army Public School massacre in December last year when security forces found that the SIMs used by the terrorists were issued under fake names.
