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Pakistan may freeze accounts of sectarian outfits

Islamabad, October 9
The Pakistan Government has ordered intelligence agencies to identify local sectarian outfits involved in internal violence and their sources of income which may lead to a freezing of their funds.

“Pakistani agencies have been asked to identify all sectarian militant organisations, their whereabouts, links and sources of income, local and foreign. They have also been asked to trace the routes through which weapons make their way to their hideouts,” Pakistan daily The News said.

Quoting well-placed sources, it said the “the government move indicates that it might cut off the umbilical cord of terrorist outfits by freezing their accounts”.

The report said the “ill-reputed terrorist-militant organisations” whose accounts are likely to be frozen include Sipah-e-Sahaba of Pakistan, the Sunni extremist organisation and Tehrik Jafriya of Pakistan, its rival Shia outfit.

It said the government has set up a task force called ‘Sectarian Terrorist Activities Record’ to closely monitor activities of the outfits.

“The government had not thought of cutting off their foreign roots and freezing their accounts earlier. It is only in the wake of the US step of freezing accounts of terrorist organisations worldwide that the government started thinking on similar lines to combat terrorism within the country.”

The move follows the freezing of bank accounts of militant outfit Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and Al Rashid Trust, which figure in the US list of terrorist groups. Washington had frozen the assets of terrorist organisations having links to Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaida network.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani military authorities, seeking to dampen anti-American violence, have detained a third prominent pro-Taliban Islamic leader and placed him under house arrest, a party official said today.

Maulana Azam Tariq, head of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), a militant group belonging to the majority Sunni Muslim sect of Islam, was detained at Lahore airport yesterday and taken to his house in the town of Jhang in central Punjab province.

“He is under house arrest,’’ the official said.

Maulana Tariq is the third leader from parties belonging to the pro-Taliban Afghanistan and Pakistan Defence Council to be held by the government of military ruler Gen Pervez Musharraf.

The Defence Council, formed earlier this year to support the Taliban after new UN Security Council sanctions were imposed, groups 35 Islamic parties that pledge strong resistance to any attack on neighbouring Islamic Afghanistan.

Since the weekend, Pakistan has placed under house arrest two other prominent radical Islamic leaders — Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Maulana Samiul Haq, heads of their own factions of the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI) party and key Taliban backers.

For the first time in Pakistan, the military government today ordered the army to set up bunkers of sandbags at key installations in the capital, a day after anti-US violence erupted in several cities.

Soldiers armed with automatic rifles stood on guard inside the bunkers, which were reinforced on the interior with bricks and concrete and put up at all entrances to the diplomatic enclave that houses the US Embassy.

The bunkers were also thrown up outside Islamabad’s television station and near several other government buildings.

One overlooked the stately parliament building.

Small army units were deployed at all intersections in the city, each equipped with a wireless set.

Officials had no comment on the deployment of such a large number of troops in the capital, which was calm on Monday, a day when pro-Taliban protesters rampaged in the south-western city of Quetta and north-western city of Peshawar.

Residents said they had never seen such tight security in the city, which saw the burning of US Embassy in 1979 and a siege by tens of thousands of Shia Muslims in the 1980s that ended without violence. PTI, Reuters