Pakistan brings terror charges against Hafiz Saeed

PAKISTAN has registered two anti-terror cases against the head of a banned charity linked by India to the Mumbai attacks.

The charged man, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, heads Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which is blacklisted in the West as a terrorist group.

Police also charge that Saeed founded the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group accused by India and Washington of killing 166 people in Mumbai last year in attacks that damaged relations with Pakistan.

The cases were registered against him by security officials in Faisalabad, an industrial town in the central Punjab province.

“Saeed has been booked for inciting public sentiments and arranging and addressing unlawful congregation”, police official Mohammad Mansha told AFP.

During a meeting with activists of his banned organisation in Faisalabad, Saeed urged people to wage jihad against anti-Islamic forces and has criticised the Pakistani government in recent speeches, police said.

Another police official, Rana Mohammad Ashfaq, confirmed two cases against Saeed had been registered under anti-terrorism laws after the cleric sought donations to advance jihad.

A spokesman for Jammat-ud-Dawa strongly condemned the case registration.

“The government should not take criticism from someone as a crime. Saeed did not commit any crime by talking about jihad as it is also mentioned in the holy Koran,” said the spokesman, Yahya Mujahid.

Pakistan put Saeed and three of his co-leaders under house arrest in early December and publicly shut offices of the charity after the UN Security Council blacklisted the organisation a terror group.

But Saeed was released in June on order from the high court in Pakistan's eastern city Lahore.

The US considers Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which operates out of a sprawling headquarters near Lahore, a terror group, and Pakistan came under huge Western pressure to round up Saeed and other Dawa members.

Saeed, whom India accused of masterminding the Mumbai attacks, reportedly abandoned LeT when it was outlawed in Pakistan following an attack on the Indian Parliament, which New Delhi blamed on LeT.

New Delhi accused “official agencies” in Pakistan of being involved in the 60-hour assault by 10 militant gunmen on India's financial capital.

Pakistan has arrested five people suspected of involvement in the assault, including the alleged mastermind, Zakiduddin Lakhvi; their trial continues.

Source: The Australian

India longs to follow Israeli path of reprisal

Shashi Tharoor January 19, 2009

AS Israeli planes and tanks exact a heavy toll on Gaza, India's leaders and strategic thinkers have been watching with an unusual degree of interest, and some empathy.

Unsurprisingly, India's Government has joined the rest of the world in calling for an end to the military action, but its criticism of Israel has been muted. As Israel demonstrates anew its determination to end attacks on its civilians by militants based in Hamas-controlled territory, many in India, still smarting from the horrors of the Mumbai attacks in November, have been asking: Why can't we do the same?

For many Indians, the temptation to identify with Israel was strengthened by the terrorists' seizure of Mumbai's Chabad House Jewish centre and the painful awareness that India and Israel share many of the same enemies. India, with its 150-million strong Muslim population, has long been a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause and remains staunchly committed to an independent Palestinian state. But the Mumbai attacks confirmed what has become apparent in recent years: the forces of global Islamist terror have added Indians to their target list of reviled "Jews and crusaders".

Just as Israel has frequently been attacked by rockets fired from across its border with Gaza, India has suffered repeated assaults by killers trained, equipped, financed, and directed by elements based next door in Pakistan. When US President George W.Bush's press secretary equated members of Hamas with the Mumbai killers, her comments were widely circulated in India.

Yet there the parallels end.

Israel is a small country living in a permanent state of siege, highly security conscious and surrounded by forces hostile to it; India is a giant country with notoriously permeable borders and an open society known for its lax and easygoing ways.

Whereas many regard Israel's toughness as its principal characteristic, India's citizens view their country as a soft state, its underbelly easily penetrated by determined terrorists. Whereas Israel notoriously exacts grim retribution for every attack on its soil, India has endured with numbing stoicism an endless series of bomb blasts, including at least six major assaults in different locations in 2008 alone. Terrorism has taken more lives in India than in any country other than Iraq, and yet, unlike Israel, India has seemed unable to do anything about it.

Moreover, whereas Israel's principal adversary is presently Hamas, India faces a slew of terrorist organisations: Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Jamaat-ud-Dawa and others. But whereas Hamas operates without international recognition from Gaza - its legitimacy questioned even by the Palestinian Authority - India's tormentors function from Pakistan, a sovereign member of the UN. And that makes all the difference.

Hamas is in no position to repay Israel's air and ground attacks in kind, whereas an Indian attack on Pakistani territory, even one targeting terrorist bases and training camps, would invite swift retaliation from the Pakistani army. Israel can dictate the terms of its military incursion and end it at will, whereas an Indian military action would immediately spark a war with a well-armed neighbour that neither side could win. And, at the end of the day, one chilling fact would prevent India from thinking that it could use Israel's playbook: the country that condones, if not foments, the terror attacks on India is a nuclear power.

So India has gone to the international community with evidence to prove that the Mumbai attacks were planned in Pakistan and conducted by Pakistani citizens, who maintained contact with handlers in Pakistan throughout the operation. While India's Government had briefly hoped the proof could enable Pakistan's weak civilian Government to rein in the malign elements in its society, the Pakistani authorities' reaction has been one of denial.

Yet no one doubts that Pakistan's all-powerful military intelligence has, over the past two decades, created and supported terrorist organisations as instruments of Pakistani policy in Afghanistan and India.

When India's embassy in Kabul was hit by a suicide bomber last July, US intelligence sources revealed that not only was Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence behind the attack, but that it made little effort to cover its tracks. The ISI knew perfectly well that India would not go to war with Pakistan to avenge the killing of its diplomatic personnel.

The fact is that India knows that war will accomplish nothing. Indeed, it is just what the terrorists want: a cause that would rally all Pakistanis to the flag and provide Pakistan's army an excuse to abandon the unpopular fight against the Taliban and al-Qa'ida in the west for the more familiar terrain of the Indian border in the east. India's Government sees no reason to play into the hands of those who seek that outcome.

Yet, when Indians watch Israel take the fight to the enemy, killing those who launched rockets against it and dismantling many of the sites from which the rockets flew, some cannot resist wishing that they could do something similar in Pakistan. India understands, though, that the collateral damage would be too high, the price in civilian lives unacceptable, and the risks of the conflict spiralling out of control too acute to contemplate such an option. So Indians place their trust in international diplomacy and watch with ill-disguised wistfulness as Israel does what they could never permit themselves to do.

Shashi Tharoor, an acclaimed novelist and commentator, is a former undersecretary-general of the UN.

Source: The Australian

In US, LeT chief's kin raised funds for jihad

NEW DELHI: For all the protestations that the Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a charitable organisation and Hafiz Mohammed Saeed is an injured innocent, it's clear that the organisation and Saeed's family, in particular, have been in the crosshairs of US government for several years and a couple of Saeed's family members are already in US custody.

As the Lashkar-e-Taiba grew in stature, profile and links to violent terrorism in Pakistan, curiously, its amir Saeed's family kept making tracks to the US to live and work there over the past decade.

Over the years, LeT aka Jamaat-ud-Dawa has morphed from an ISI-sponsored terror outfit against India to become a global jihadist organisation with increasing ties to Al Qaeda.

The US has been on its trail for some time now, but could not do much because the JuD had sprouted roots in almost all areas of Pakistani life. The Mumbai attacks resurrected US security agencies' interest in this outfit.

And the reason for that, sources said, was that Saeed's family had been making determined tracks to the US -- to live there as imams and preach and raise funds for jihad.

The evidence for that came in bits and pieces. The first to land in the US was Muhammad Masood, Saeed's brother, who arrived in 1987 on a J-1 exchange visitor visa. He lived in the Boston area, working odd jobs until he started teaching at the Islamic Academy of New England at the Islamic Center of New England in Sharon, Massachusetts. Masood was arrested in November 2006 and charged with visa fraud and other unnamed crimes. Read more ...

Source: Times of India

Pakistan's Post-Mumbai Clampdown Targets Islamists

Pakistani police officers prepare to seal the
door of a Jamaat ud-Dawa office in Quetta,
Pakistan on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008.

By Patrick Goodenough

Pakistani authorities have placed under house arrest the founder of the militant Islamist group that India blames for the Mumbai terrorist attacks, and on Friday they were shutting down the offices of his “charitable” organization.

Hafiz Saeed claims the charity, Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD), is unrelated to the outlawed militant group, Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), but the U.S. State Department calls it a “front operation” for LeT.

Pakistan moved against Saeed and JuD two weeds after the attacks in India’s commercial capital that killed more than 170 people. It did so under pressure from India, the U.S. and other governments, and a day after a U.N. Security Council sanctions committee imposed an assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo on four JuD/LeT members. Read more ...

Source: CNS News

The 'charity' that plotted the Mumbai attacks

Pakistan has a hard job rooting out militancy. But it cannot let Jamaat-ud-Dawa carry on fooling people about its aims.

By Anthony Loyd

Wriggling under the illumination of media scrutiny after accusations of its involvement in the slaughter in Mumbai, Jamaat-ud-Dawa's response last week was a workmanlike PR counter-move. Journalists were taken on a guided tour of the organisation's headquarters, 30 miles from Lahore, where a civilised lunch of spiced chicken and rice accompanied declarations of innocence, condemnation of the terrorist attack and claims to be nothing more than a charity group involved in relief work.

Terrorists? Not us, guv. But in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, just three weeks before the Mumbai attacks, the advice of PR gurus was noticeably absent when I met a leading official from the group. “We don't like democracy,” Atiq ur-Rahman told me, eyes ablaze. “Our struggle is to establish an Islamic caliphate throughout the world. Whichever force tries to resist it shall be shattered.”

He bubbled with the internal rage so characteristic of militants, and having given a perfunctory resumé of JuD's relief work among Pakistani civilians displaced by fighting and natural disaster, launched himself into a diatribe against India and the West. The rant concluded with an amazing on-the-spot attempt to recruit my interpreter, citing the abuse of Muslims by infidel forces in Somalia, Chechnya and Kashmir. In the embarrassed silence that followed his departure we were left to flick through a copy of Why We Are Performing Jihad, the jihadist manual that he had handed us to further his case. Read more ...

Source: Times Online