—— Minister discloses Gwadar attacker named as missing person
Staff Report
ISLAMABAD: Information Minister Attaullah Tarar on Monday regretted that content regulation seemed to be missing on social media which has become a source of fake news.
The minister remarks, during a news conference in Islamabad, comes as users continue to face disrup-tion of the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) for over nearly a month.
The X website has been largely offline since February 17, with occasional service restorations, mainly after former commissioner Rawalpindi Liaquat Ali Chatta made a statement in front of the media claim-ing that the “elections were rigged”. On the other hand, a majority of users use VPNs to access the platform. He said the Gwadar Port Authority was attacked and the responsibility for this attack was accepted by the Balochistan Liberation Army. The terrorist, Karim Jan, killed during the attack on the Gwadar Port Authority was included in the missing persons list, the minister added and said, when Karim Jan’s body was handed over to the heirs, it transpired that he was declared a missing person from August 2022. The minister said that it was very alarming that the BLA terrorist was involved in the Gwadar Port Au-thority attack, but the campaign was being conducted for two years by dubbing him as a missing per-son.
He said that these were very sensitive matters, adding that Gwadar was a commercial hub, part of CPEC, and an attack on it was an attack on the national economy. To a query, the minister said the Punjab Governor had decided on the matter related to the fee of Ahad Cheema’s children in accordance with the law.
Earlier, According to Information Technology (IT) experts, the government should explore viable alternatives rather than resorting to suspending mobile phone broadband and data services. They argue that such suspensions not only disrupt entire IT services but also inflict major financial losses on IT businesses, impacting both public and private organisations, as well as the general public in the country. IT-related businesses encompass numerous services, including those provided by the IT sector, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), commercial banks, and their respective apps, e-stores, and more. People heavily rely on mobile phone or digital apps for payments and various e-services, such as InDrive, Yango, Bykea, FoodPanda, Daraz, aimed at saving time.
“We need to enhance IT exports, and human resources are crucial for this endeavor. The human resource works in the country for providing services to foreign clients. Internet disruption impacts IT services, and foreign clients hire services from neighbouring countries because of disruptions of Net services here,” lamented Saquib Ahmad, SAP Managing Director in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
