Pakistan scraps 200,000 illegal IDs held by Afghan refugees

Pakistan has cancelled about 200,000 national identity cards fraudulently obtained by Afghanistan refugees.

Pakistan’s Interior Minister said: “We have data of 1.5 million Afghan refugees having legal status and about 800,000 Afghans living in the country illegally.”

The computerised national identity cards (CNICs) fraudulently obtained by Afghan nationals have been cancelled, Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said on Saturday.

Talking to reporters at the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) office at Rehmanabad, he said these cards had been issued to Afghan nationals on the basis of fake documents, including fraudulent birth certificates.

Dawn News reported that Ahmed also said the online visa facility had been provided to citizens of 192 countries and 200,000 applications had been received for online visas in a single day.