In a lengthy Urdu statement posted on the website of his ostensibly charitable Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) organization, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed said Islam was a “religion of peace” and that the killing of women and children during jihad is forbidden. Tuesday’s attack on the army-run school in the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province was carried out by “enemies of Islam,” he said. (Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, a close ally of the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility.) The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government highlighted Saeed’s comment on its Twitter feed: “No religion allows killing of children. Islam across all its branches FORBIDS killing of children/women - Hafiz Saeed.” Saeed is a U.S.-designated terrorist subject to a $10 million reward offer for allegedly masterminding “numerous attacks,” including the 2008 terrorist assault in Mumbai that left 166 people dead, six of them Americans.
Over a 60-hour period gunmen attacked a railway station, two hospitals, a municipal facility, a Jewish center, a cinema, a cafe, a bank and two hotels in India’s commercial capital. Among the dead were children as young as five, including a 13 year-old American girl, Naomi Scherr. Female victims included the pregnant wife of an American rabbi (The rabbi was also killed, while their two year-old son was rescued by his Indian nanny.) India blamed the attack on the Pakistani jihadist group Lashkar e-Toiba (LeT), which was founded by Saeed in the late 1980s – with the backing of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency – to fight Indian rule in Kashmir. Days after the attack, India handed Pakistan a list of 20 suspects topped by Saeed. The State Department says JuD is merely a front for LeT, and the U.S. “foreign terrorist organization” designation covers both names.
The U.S. has also accused LeT of carrying out attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan, sometimes in collaboration with the Haqqani network, an Afghan Taliban faction. Among their alleged joint operations was a July 2008 suicide bombing at the Indian Embassy in Kabul in which 58 people died. A senior U.S. military officer has labeled LeT a “global threat.” Under pressure from India and the U.S., Pakistan did place Saeed under house arrest after the Mumbai attack but refused to indict or extradite him. Courts later ordered his release, and in May 2011, Saeed led protest rallies in Lahore over the death of Osama bin Laden. He called the dead terrorist a martyr and demanded that Pakistan sever ties with Washington. Despite being wanted by India and the U.S., Saeed is today not only a free man but a prominent one, a situation which India says is a reflection of Pakistan’s double standards on terrorism.
Just two weeks ago, he convened a two-day convention in Lahore, attracting supporters from across the country, some of whom traveled there by special buses and trains. T.V. Rajeswar, former director of India’s Intelligence Bureau, wrote in an article for the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi Tuesday that Pakistan’s government and the ISI had backed the high-profile rally “with finance and organization.” “It is a well-known fact that, right from the time of the Mumbai attacks on November 26, 2008 that Lashkar e-Toiba and its twin organization Jamaat-ud-Dawa are proxies of Pakistan army and the ISI, with the full backing of the Pakistani government itself,” he said. While even Pakistani analysts acknowledge that the government and ISI regard LeT as a strategic asset, Islamabad consistently denies claims of collusion, generally responding by insisting that Pakistan is a victim of terrorism, not a facilitator.
Terror as an ‘instrument of state policy’
