ISLAMABAD: Federal Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan on Monday said that interior ministry officials have been banned from meeting foreigners and travelling abroad on officials tours.

Chaudhry Nisar was briefing the National Assembly Standing Committee on Interior in Islamabad, about the performance of his ministry and said that new policies about arms licenses, private security companies and bullet-proof vehicles are on the cards.

“Hundreds of security companies are active across the country while such companies are providing services of security personals without their proper training,” he said.

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The federal minister said that the files of sensitive cases were found missing in the interior ministry and the record of the ministry is being computerised with the support of the Nadra and the Ministry of Information Technology.

“I also put ban on the officials of the ministry regarding their meetings with foreigners, while the officials of the interior ministry will not visit foreign countries in future,” he said.

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The Minister said that thousands of Rangers personnel were appointed for the security of VVIP’s and added he has taken their services back as the prime purpose of the law enforcement agencies (LEA) personnel is to protect the country.

“The intelligence agencies are not involved in taping of telephones of common citizens including journalists and politicians,” said the interior minister adding that “Due to the political differences, I will not put name of any individual on the Exit Control List (ECL).”

“Thousands of official passports were issued during previous government's tenure, which were being used for smuggling while I also cancelled over 2,000 officials passports in this regard,” Khan added.

“We will set up 70 new passport offices at district level while the ministry is also working to issue E-passport in near future,” he added.

Chaudhry Nisar said the validity of passports has been increased to ten years from five years, in order to facilitate the people.

He said six machine readable passports offices are operational in different countries and their number will be increased to fifty six this year to facilitate the overseas Pakistanis.

The federal interior minister said that the PML-N government put ban on the issuance of the licenses of prohibited bore while 70,000 licenses of prohibited bore were issued in past tenure.

He said that the bio-metric verification of 100 million SIM’s have been completed, while the roaming facility of Afghan SIMs have been blocked which has helped the security forces to prevent terrorism.

The Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz (PML-N) stalwart said that the verification of SIMs underway across the country while the process to verify SIM’s will be complete till April 12 under the National Action Plan.