More than 125 million pre-paid mobile phone users in Pakistan may lose their connections as telecom operators have expressed their inability to re-verify their subscribers within the 28-day deadline set by the government after a brutal Taliban attack on an army school in Peshawar.

Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan last week set the deadline for the top five telecom operators -- Mobilink, Ufone, Telenor, Warid and Zong. He said the government did not want "free availability" of SIMs to militants. The

Taliban militants who attacked the army-run school in Peshawar on December 16 that killed 150 people, most of them children, used a SIM (subscriber identification module) of one of these top five telecom operators.

"We cannot re-verify over 125 million pre-paid connections in 28 days. If we are forced to so then eventually we will have to block the pre-paid SIMs to meet the deadline," said a senior official of a cellular company. He said the operators needed at least 150-200 days to complete the re-verification process.