PPP leader and former interior minister Rehman Malik has reportedly written to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, demanding the formation of a judicial commission to investigate WikiLeaks’ allegation that the US was given access to Pakistan’s national identity database during his (Malik’s) tenure.
WikiLeaks, in connection with the recently leaked National Security Agency report leak, has again shared the old revelation that the United States and the United Kingdom had “stolen” Pakistani citizens’ identification records.
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Assange claimed that a front company called the International Identity Services was created in the UK and hired as consultants for NADRA to “squirrel out data from all of Pakistan”.
“We discovered a cable in 2009 from the US Embassy in Islamabad… Prime Minister [Yousaf Raza] Gilani and Interior Minister [Rehman] Malik offered to share National Database Registration Authority (NADRA) [records],” Julian Assange, the founder of the Wikileaks, had informed Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf chairman Imran Khan while interviewing the latter in 2013.
If yesterday’s NSA report is accurate it is not unusual; US+MI6 set up a front to steal all of Pakistan’s voters https://t.co/T0Gc6hyyHr pic.twitter.com/oERYoferNo
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 6, 2017
Assange claimed that a front company called the International Identity Services was created in the UK and hired as consultants for NADRA to “squirrel out data from all of Pakistan”. “It seems to me that that is a theft of some national treasure of Pakistan, the entire Pakistani database registry of its people,” Assange had said.
Speaking to reporters outside Parliament House on Thursday, the PPP senator was reacting to the WikiLeaks tweet from June 6 which contained an account of meetings between former US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and top Pakistan officials, including Mr. Malik.
The cable claims that Rehman Malik, who was interior minister back then, had told the then Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that his ministry had already submitted for legal review the possibility of sharing passenger name record data on passengers traveling to and from Pakistan to the U.S. and Canada.
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He claimed that as interior minister, he had never accepted requests asking for access to travel records of Pakistani nationals and called on incumbent Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan to “investigate this fake news as it is a matter of grave concern for him and many Pakistanis”.
Calling the report “totally baseless, fictitious and fabricated”, he emphasized that no country was given access to the National Database and Registration Authority’s (Nadra) records.
He claimed that as interior minister, he had never accepted requests asking for access to travel records of Pakistani nationals and called on incumbent Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan to “investigate this fake news as it is a matter of grave concern for him and many Pakistanis”.
Mr. Malik also claimed that Usman Mobin, the current Nadra chairman, was the chief technical officer at the time, and can be asked whether such access was granted to any country.
Mr. Rehman’s demands come at a time when the prime minister himself is embroiled in a legal battle to preserve his own term.