The Pakistan government on Tuesday added Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed’s Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation to its proscribed list of organisations under its Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997. Islamabad had reportedly banned these organisations on February 21, but then added them to its list of groups “under watch” on Monday.
The country’s National Counter Terrorism Authority on Tuesday removed both Jamaat-ud-Dawa and the “charity group” Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation from the list of groups “under watch” and added them to the list of banned organisations, taking the total number of such outfits up to 70. Now, only two groups – the Ghulman-e-Sahaba and the Maymar Trust remain under the “under watch” category.
Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior Secretary Azam Suleman Khan claimed at a press conference on Tuesday that the delay in listing Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation as banned outfits was due to problems with paperwork, Dawn reported.
Earlier in the day, the Pakistan government claimed it has detained 44 members of banned organisations, including Masood Azhar’s brother Mufti Abdur Rauf. Azhar is the chief of the terrorist outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad, which had claimed responsibility for the suicide attack in Jammu and Kashmir on February 14. Forty personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force were killed in the attack.
In February 2018, Mamnoon Hussain, who was president of Pakistan at the time, had promulgated an ordinance to ban outfits that the United Nations has designated as terrorist organisations. The United States too has labelled the JuD and its charity group “terrorist fronts” for the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. India has accused Saeed of planning the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, in which 160 people were killed.
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