FATF slams ‘brutal’ Pahalgam terror attack, says it could not have occurred without ‘money and means’

Paris/New Delhi: In a major development, the global Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on Monday severely condemned the “brutal terrorist attack” in Pahalgam on April 22, stating that it could not have taken place without “money and the means” to move funds between terrorist supporters.

“Terrorist attacks kill, maim and inspire fear around the world. The FATF notes with grave concern and condemns the brutal terrorist attack in Pahalgam on 22 April 2025. This, and other recent attacks, could not occur without money and the means to move funds between terrorist supporters,” the FATF said in a statement on Monday after its plenary meeting.

It mentioned further: “As highlighted by the FATF President at the recent No Money for Terror Conference in Munich, no single company, authority, or country can combat this challenge alone. We must be unified against the scourge of global terrorism. Because terrorists need to succeed only once to achieve their goal, while we have to succeed every time to prevent it.”

As many as 26 innocent tourists were massacred in the Pakistan-sponsored terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam.

Investigations into the Pahalgam terror attack brought out the communication nodes of terrorists in and to Pakistan. A group calling itself The Resistance Front (TRF) – a front for the UN-proscribed Pakistani terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba – had claimed responsibility for the attack.

India had given inputs about the TRF in the half-yearly report to the Monitoring Team of the United Nations’ 1267 Sanctions Committee in May and November 2024, bringing out its role as a cover for Pakistan-based terrorist groups.

Earlier too, in December 2023, India had informed the monitoring team about LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammad operating through small terror groups such as the TRF. Pakistan’s pressure to remove references to TRF in the April 25 UN Security Council Press Statement were highlighted by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) during Operation Sindoor.

Asserting that Pakistan has a history of misusing bailout packages for cross-border terrorism, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh had called for putting the failed state back on the FATF grey list.

“The state and non-state actors are two sides of the same coin in Pakistan, which became evident when designated terrorists were accorded funerals with state honours,” Singh said earlier this month.

The FATF, which develops and promotes policies to protect the global financial system against money laundering, terrorist financing and the financing of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, has acknowledged in the past that India has suffered from the effects of terrorism consistently since its independence in 1947 and still faces a “disparate range of terrorism threats”, categorised into different theatres.

Speaking exclusively with IANS recently, several experts, including former diplomats and counterterrorism experts, backed a strong action against Pakistan, including by putting the country back on the grey list of the FATF for its continuous involvement in terror financing and backing global terror outfits.

“Terror doesn’t come out of the blue. It’s something that has to be financed, structured and so forth. So, it’s a long, concerted action that lies behind all this terror. Therefore, you need to do whatever you can globally, also regionally, to secure that we don’t have financing that will flow into the streams of terror. It has to stop. Pakistan has to be put where they belong. So, they have to be put on that list, no doubt about that,” Freddy Svane, the former Danish Ambassador to India, told IANS in an exclusive interview, earlier this month.

IANS