Saudi Arabia’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel Al-Jubeir on Wednesday said that people perpetrating terror must be listed as global terrorists and tried and punished, NDTV reported. His statement follows India’s reiteration of its demand to list Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist at the United Nations.

The Pakistan-based militant outfit had claimed responsibility for a suicide bomb attack on a Central Reserve Police Force convoy in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district on February 14, which killed 40 soldiers.

Advertisement

The Saudi minister’s statement followed criticism against Riyadh after it issued a joint statement with Pakistan calling for the avoidance of “politicisation of the United Nation’s listing regime”. In a PTI interview, Al-Jubeir said, “I think people here assumed that the joint statement had to do with one particular individual [Azhar]. It did not. The intention was that the process of designation is clear and not political.”

Al-Jubeir said the guilty must be brought justice. “Our policy on listing individuals is very clear, if someone is engaged in terrorism, if someone belongs to a terror organisation that is responsible for murdering people, if somebody finances terrorism or recruits for terrorism, that person is implicated in terrorism and ought to be punished and if you cannot capture that person, he or she has to be designated so that they cannot roam the world freely and when they are captured, they are brought to justice,” the Saudi foreign minister said.

The Saudi minister stressed on the need for a de-escalation of the situation between India and Pakistan. “Pakistan is an important country to Saudi Arabia and India is important to Saudi Arabia and so it pains us to see conflict between two countries that we believe to be two friendly countries,” the minister said. “We believe that instability in this part of the world is danger to rest of the world.”