The White House has abruptly shut down on suspicion of fraud an ongoing online petition that asked it to designate Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, citing a law introduced in the House of Representatives last week, The Hindustan Times reported.
In a blurb headlined, ‘Closed Petition’, the White House’s ‘We the People’ web page, which hosts the initiative inviting petitions to the administration, said on Monday, “This petition has been archived because it did not meet the signature requirements. It can no longer be signed.”
The petition had, until October 21, to gather 100,000 signatures to merit a response from the White House under the rules of the programme, which it had already collected, and several times more. At closure, the petition had 625,723 signatures.
India also called Pakistan a “terrorist state” and accused it of sponsoring terrorism, hours after Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif raised Kashmir issue at the UN General Assembly session.