| Submit your comments on this article |
| India-Pakistan |
| A profile of Hafiz Saeed |
| 2004-01-23 |
| EFL, registration required General Musharraf recently banned a number of militias again because they had renamed themselves and were seen to be functioning as before. Their leaders too were supposed to be arrested but were not for various reasons. Lashkar-e-Taiba was banned again but its leader Hafiz Saeed was allowed to go free and fulminate against the policies of General Musharraf, especially the policy on Kashmir. He also boldly condemned the SAARC summit because it pledged free trade with India. Jaish-e-Muhammad was banned again but its leader Masood Azhar, who was supposed to be under house arrest in Bahawalpur was found not to be under house arrest at all. While the police went looking for him he was reported to have taken shelter for some days with an adviser of the Punjab government. After the suicide bomber of 25 December was discovered to have been a member of the Jaish, the being at large of Masood Azhar should have been of great concern. The leader of the re-banned Harkatul Mujahideen, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, was not arrested but asked to remain within his Jamia Khalid bin Walid mosque in Islamabad. The militia most closely aligned with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Harkat al-Jihad al-Islami, was never banned for some reason, but its leader Qari Saifullah Akhtar was too endangered to stay in Pakistan and was currently housed in Saudi Arabia in the protection of a prince. General Musharraf is right when he says that threat to Pakistan’s security was from within Pakistan. People with close links with Al Qaeda are all here and are allowed by General Musharraf to roam freely and in some cases speak out against him in a most threatening way. The man who stands out in this regard is Hafiz Saeed the leader of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba. He was accused by India of having attacked the Indian parliament on 13 December 2001, which he denied, but he had earlier owned up to an attack on Delhi’s Red Fort in 2000. He was arrested in Islamabad on 31 December 2001, but according to his organisation’s weekly Jihad Times he knew that he was to be arrested and had reorganised his outfit in anticipation. He was in fact asked by ‘someone important’ on the phone to come to Islamabad where he was to be arrested. He was let off by the Lahore High Court on 19 November 2002. Hafiz Saeed and the state of Pakistan: Hafiz Saeed is a Kashmiri whose family lived in Simla before partition. Saeed’s father Maulana Kamaluddin was a religious scholar, so was his uncle Maulana Hafiz Abdullah who later helped in the organisation of Lashkar-e-Taiba. Hafiz Saeed graduated from Sargodha Government College and later did MA in Arabic and Islamiyat from Punjab University. In the University Old Campus he was a nazim of Islami Jamiyat Tulaba, the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami. After graduation in 1974 he was appointed lecturer at the University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Lahore in the Islamiyat Department. It is from here that he was sent for higher studies to Saudi Arabia. He graduated from King Saud University, Riyadh, and while in Saudi Arabia he was close to the famous Saudi scholar Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz who was the first to pronounce the fatwa of jihad in Afghanistan in 1979. According to magazine Nida-e-Millat (22 March 2001) Hafiz Saeed took part in the election campaign of Jamaat-e-Islami in 1970 but was put off by politics after losing. He turned against democracy and was traumatised by the fall of East Pakistan in 1971. It was after the fatwa of jihad in 1979 by Bin Baz that he turned to jihad in Afghanistan and went to the training camp of Abdur Rasool Sayyaf where he also met the teacher of Osama bin Laden and Arab fighters, Dr Abdullah Azzam. He admitted that during his training he met Osama bin Laden a number of times. In 1986, the teachers of the Islamiyat faculty of Lahore’s Engineering University had founded Markaz Dawatul Irshad, an Ahle Hadith organisation devoted to the Saudi brand of Islam and raising armies for the jihad in Afghanistan. In 1990 when Hafiz Saeed set up his fighting outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba it was in consultation with the professors in Lahore and the organisers of the Kunhar camp in Afghanistan where the Wahhabis had set up their own government. One of those professors that setup Markaz Dawah ul Irshad was Abdullah Azzam. Because of that, the Lashkar has all sorts of contacts with the global Jihad movement and is much more internationalist than other Pak Jihadi outfits. Because of it’s Wahhabi ideology it also is allowed to operate in Saudi Arabia. The dominance of Lashkar-e-Taiba: The training camps of Lashkar-e-Taiba were run with Rs 350000000 annually. The Lashkar property at Chauburji Lahore is supposed to be worth Rs 75000000. And the Aqsa training camp in Hyderabad Sindh is worth Rs 50000000. The Muridke centre of Markaz Dawatul Irshad was said to be bought for the organisation by an Arab prince with Rs 180000000. Apart from external funding Hafiz Saeed was able to collect funds from the markets. The money from the boxes placed in the shops came to a colossal amount till the government banned the collection. At its height, Hafiz Saeed had 600,000 boxes placed in the various markets and employed 500 collectors who would see to it that the funds were contributed and then carried back to the centre. Each collector got a monthly salary and a motorbike. It was estimated that each box collected an average of Rs 200 per day, which took the daily income of Hafiz Saeed to Rs 120000000 daily! Lashkar-e-Taiba was indeed getting most of its funding from the people at large towards the end of its career. For many years, on the occasion of Eid Al-Adha, his organisation in Lahore got more skins of the sacrificial animals than any other organisation. |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |
| #2 General Musharraf recently banned a number of militias again because they had renamed themselves and were seen to be functioning as before. [...] Lashkar-e-Taiba was banned again but its leader Hafiz Saeed was allowed to go free and fulminate against the policies of General Musharraf, especially the policy on Kashmir. He also boldly condemned the SAARC summit because it pledged free trade with India. Musharraf in a televised news conference: "I hereby declare that the organization named Lashkar-e-Taiba is officially disallowed. Banned. Illegal." {television then returns to regular programming} Hafiz Saeed: "Allrighty, from here on, our organization will now be known as Taiba-e-Lashkar!" |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2004-1-23 12:15:50 PM |
| #1 but was put off by politics after losing.- just another spoiled brat without the patience or smarts to make it happen within the system, but stupid and arrogant enough to think it would be easier to take the system on and win. Hafiz Saeed had 600,000 boxes placed in the various markets and employed 500 collectors who would see to it that the funds were contributed and then carried back to the centre. Proving once again that these terrorists are just mobsters pretending to be jihadis. |
| Posted by: B 2004-1-23 9:38:46 AM |