Pakistani police on Friday extended their crackdown on a charity linked to the group India accuses of planning the Mumbai massacre, arresting dozens of members, officials said.
Pakistan began late on Thursday to shut down Jamaat-ud-Dawa, placing its leaders under house arrest and freezing its assets, a day after the United Nations said it was a front for the banned militant group.
Police in Pakistani Kashmir, where Jamaat-ud Dawa is particularly active, said the charity’s local leader was now under house arrest and four workers had been detained.
”We have arrested four Jamaat-ud-Dawa members and put their leader under house arrest,” Chaudhry Imtiaz, deputy commissioner of the state capital Muzaffarabad, said.
”We have also sealed an office, a motor workshop and two schools belonging to the charity,” he said.
Pakistan has launched a major crackdown on militant groups operating on its soil in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, which India says were planned by the outlawed Kashmiri militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
In southern Sindh province authorities have arrested more than 40 people and sealed more than 30 offices and four hospitals belonging to Jamaat-ud-Dawa, provincial home secretary Arif Ahmed Khan said.
A spokesperson for the charity in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province said that authorities there had arrested 150 people linked to the organisation and closed 42 offices in recent days.
Jamaat-ud-Dawa is one of Pakistan’s biggest charities and is known in Kashmir for its relief work after the devastating 2005 earthquake there.
Hundreds of Kashmiris rallied outside the UN office in Muzaffarabad on Friday, chanting anti-US and anti-Indian slogans to protest against the closure.
Speaking to Agence France-Presse by telephone from his home, the leader of Jamaat-ud-Dawa in Pakistani Kashmir, Maulana Abdul Aziz Alvi, condemned the move.
”We regret it, we condemn what our government is doing under American pressure,” Alvi said.
”Our work, inshallah [God willing], shall continue and will not be affected by these tactics.” — AFP
