US presses Pakistan for broader passenger profiling

The US is putting on pressure on Pakistan for much broader passenger profiling as part of its new efforts to crack down hard on terrorists, a move which has been resisted so far by Islamabad.

Pakistan currently provides in advance only the names of passengers travelling to the US, but now Washington is insisting on complete database of all flyers from Pakistan, the New York Times reported today.

The American investigative agencies want to use this information to track the travel patterns of terrorists.

But the Times said now the US wants information on Pakistanis who fly to other countries to feed into its database that can detect patterns used by the terrorists, their financers, logisticians and others who support them.

The US currently has a range of confidential agreements with countries governing how much information each will share about its citizens travelling on commercial airliners. Many countries share only information about passengers travelling to the US, while others, including several in the Caribbean, have agreed to share more information about other countries that their residents visit.

In the case of Pakistan, American officials are seeking details like the recent travel histories of airline passengers and how they paid for their tickets.

Pakistan has for several years rebuffed this politically unpopular request as an invasion of its citizens' privacy. But the issue is now on a "short list" of sticking points between the two countries — including some classified counter-terrorism programmes.

The report comes in the wake of botched May 1 Times Square bombing plot, in which a 30-year-old Pakiatani born American citizen Faisal Shahzad is the main suspect.

US president Barack Obama has given his top aides a deadline of the next few weeks to resolve the issues with Pakistan, the officials said.

That pressure to deliver results has prompted senior officials like Gen James L Jones, the national security adviser, and Leon E Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to warn senior Pakistani leaders of the risks to the country’s relationship with the US if a deadly terrorist attack originated in their country.

The paper said under the new proposals analysts at the National Targeting Centre in northern Virginia, an arm of United States Customs and Border Protection, could examine the travel patterns of Pakistanis with known links to militant groups who fly to Persian Gulf countries, where donors to al-Qaeda and the Taliban live.