Lahore: Did Pakistan put Salman Khan on its terror watchlist?
The internet and media were abuzz with such a speculation after the Bollywood superstar seemed to refer to Balochistan, a province in southwest Pakistan, as a separate entity from the country.
A video of Salman mentioning Balochistan during a panel chat had surfaced days after he appeared at the Joy Forum 2025 in Riyadh. It triggered a flurry of comments online, and soon after, multiple posts alleged Pakistan considered the remark ‘controversial’ and had placed Salman under surveillance.
Now, Pakistan’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has cleared the air on the issue, saying that there is no truth to the reports linking the actor to its Anti-Terrorism Act.
The ministry’s official fact-checking team took to X to address the speculative news with a post that had a screenshot of a headline that read, ‘Pakistan puts Salman Khan on terror watchlist after Balochistan remark’. A stamp proclaiming ‘Fake news/unverified’ was embossed upon the screenshot.
The ministry wrote there is no official record of Salman Khan appearing in any Pakistani security or interior list, and added that no notification existed on NACTA’s proscribed persons page either.
“No Pakistani government official statement, notification or entry was found on NACTA’s proscribed persons page or any Ministry of Interior / provincial Home Department gazette notifying Salman Khan’s inclusion in Fourth Schedule. All publicly available reports stem from Indian media outlets repeating the allegation, but none trace back to an official Pakistani watch-list publication or formal announcement. In absence of verifiable primary evidence, the claim remains unverified and false. Given the optics, this appears to be a sensational headline rather than a substantiated fact,” read the post.
The Pakistan I & B ministry claimed that the rumour appeared to be built on repeated reports from Indian media — with no primary verification from Pakistani agencies.
Earlier this month, Salman had shared the stage with Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan at the Joy Forum 2025 in Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh, where he spoke of the mass appeal of Indian films in the Middle East.
“Right now, if you make a Hindi film and release it here (in Saudi Arabia), it will be a superhit. If you make a Tamil, Telugu, or Malayali film, it will do hundreds of crores in business because so many people from other countries have come here. There are people from Balochistan, there are people from Afghanistan, there are people from Pakistan… everyone is working here,” Salman said, mentioning Balochistan and Pakistan separately, sparking the controversy.
