Interpol Pakistan posts 286 red notices in seven months and brings 53 fugitives home

Interpol's National Central Bureau in Pakistan issued 286 red notices in the past seven months, Federal Investigation Agency Director General Usman Anwar said. Fifty-three people wanted in Pakistan were arrested abroad and sent home in the same window. Anwar, who also heads the bureau, gave the figures as police marked the United Nations International Day of Police Cooperation.

A red notice is a request to other Interpol members to locate a person and hold them pending extradition or a similar step. It is not an international arrest warrant. Each country still applies its own law when a name appears on the I-24/7 network that links national bureaus to the General Secretariat in Lyon.

How the 286 break down

Two hundred and twenty-five notices were for murder or attempted murder. Nineteen were for financial fraud and deception. Six were for human trafficking. Three were for terrorism. Thirty-three covered kidnapping, corruption, robbery and cybercrime. The bureau also issued two blue notices, which ask other countries for more information on a person, and two yellow notices, used to find missing people or to identify someone who cannot name themselves. The full count is 290 notices.

Anwar told Dawn that crime now moves across borders as a matter of course. Cybercrime, fugitives and stolen goods run through organised groups that do not stop at a frontier. The bureau's work, he said, is real-time sharing and structured pursuit, not a press note after the fact. National Central Bureaus are each country's door to Interpol. They connect local police to other bureaus and to Lyon.

What the numbers do not show

A red notice can sit on the system for years. The 53 returns are the part of the file that closed. The other murder and violence notices, and the fraud and trafficking names, are still a request. Extradition depends on treaties, dual criminality and the politics of the country where a suspect is found. Pakistan has spent years trying to bring back high-profile absconders from the Gulf. Those cases are slower than a seven-month count suggests.

Earlier in 2026 the National Accountability Bureau said Interpol had issued red notices for property developer Malik Riaz and his son Ali Riaz. Riaz lives in the United Arab Emirates. The NAB chairman said bringing him back would not be simple. That file sits outside Anwar's seven-month table, but it shows why a notice and a landing are different events. A separate Karachi notice this year named Lyari suspect Wasiullah Lakho, wanted in more than 60 cases.

The mix in the new table is also a map of what Pakistani investigators choose to internationalise. Murder dominates. Terrorism is a small slice of the published list. Trafficking is smaller still. That may mean those files move through other channels. It may mean they are not being written up as notices. The bureau did not provide a country-by-country table of where the 53 were found.

For a reader outside Pakistan the useful fact is scale. Two hundred and eighty-six red notices in seven months is a heavy use of the tool by one bureau. Fifty-three bodies on a plane home is the return rate the FIA wanted on the record. The next test is whether the murder notices convert at the same pace, and whether the three terrorism names produce a court date or another year on the list.