ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Chaudhary Nisar Ali Khan on Monday tasked the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to track all suspicious and illegal transactions and put an end to the financing of terrorist networks.

Nisar issued the directive while chairing a high level meeting to discuss FIA’s targets for 2015.

The FIA was directed to work in collaboration with financial monitoring unit (FMU) of Ministry of Finance and launch an immediate crackdown against Hawala/Hundi under the recently formulated National Action Plan (NAP) on counter terrorism.

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The FIA officials informed the participants of the meeting that 18 cases of Hawala/Hundi have been detected in which 24 accused were arrested and an amount of Rs71.5 million was recovered since the formulation of NAP.

“As part of financial monitoring mechanism of the FIA, 3 cases of suspicious transaction and 5 cases of anti-money laundering were detected in which 8 accused were arrested,” the official added.

“20 persons were arrested and spurious drugs amounting to tens of thousands of rupees were confiscated in 27 raids since January 2014,” the FIA officials said.

The officials said that 88 cases of Anti Money Laundering Act (AMLA) were registered under which 270 accused were arrested.

On the occasion, Nisar said that cyber space is being used increasingly by criminal and terrorist elements to their advantage for which an appropriate response is needed from FIA immediately in the current security scenario.

DG FIA informed that 305 cases of cyber-crimes were dealt and VoIP equipment worth Rs 83.68 Million was seized while 270 people arrested since Jan 2014.

The meeting was attended by Secretary Interior, DG FIA, National Coordinator NACTA, Additional DGs and directors of FIA from all over the country, besides high ranking NADRA officials.