India has presented evidence against the The Resistance Front (TRF), an offshoot of banned group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT*), to the UN Security Council’s (UNSC) 1267 Sanctions Committee during a meeting in New York on Thursday (IST), a government source told Sputnik India.
India is seeking to designate the TRF as a global terrorist group over its role in the Pahalgam terrorist attack on 22 April. The terrorist attack left 25 Indians and one Nepalese citizen dead.
The Indian team also met UN Under-Secretary-General Vladimir Voronkov of the Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT) and Assistant Secretary-General Natalia Gherman of the Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED), according to a UN spokesperson.
Voronkov and Gherman expressed condolences for the recent terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 22 April.
A UNSC statement released on 25 April condemning the Pahalgam attack hadn’t explicitly named TRF.
Addressing a press briefing on Operation Sindoor last week, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri blamed Pakistan, currently a non-permanent member of the UNSC, for blocking efforts to mention TRF in the UNSC statement.
At a press briefing on Tuesday, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that India had been pursuing the listing of TRF with the UNSC Sanctions Committee since 2023.
“Over the last two years or so, 2023, 2024, we have been sharing information with the United Nations Security Council. The monitoring team of the Sanctions Committee … as to why the terrorist TRF which is a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba should be listed as a terrorist entity,” Jaiswal said.
In response to the Pahalgam attack, India launched precision strikes using loitering munitions at nine terrorist camps and hideouts across Pakistan on 7 May. Codenamed Operation Sindoor, the strikes left over 100 terrorists dead, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said.
*banned terrorist group