The commitment of Pakistan’s provincial government in Punjab to fighting militancy has again come under scrutiny after it emerged that it has allocated £650,000 (US$966,684) to a charity on a UN terrorism watch list.
Budget figures released this week confirm the money was set aside for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a charity considered to be a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Punjab allocated £625,000 for its sprawling headquarters outside Lahore, which includes a hospital, school and seminary, and £25,000 for its schools.
The provincial law minister Rana Sanaullah said the funds were for charitable purposes and would be administered by government officials. A spokesman for Jamaat-ud-Dawa said the group had not yet received any official funds.
The allocation of such a large sum has resurrected worries about dangerous ambiguities in the leadership of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, which has suffered a spate of militant attacks in the past 18 months.
In February, Sanaullah campaigned at a by-election alongside a leader of Sipah Sahaba, a banned sectarian organization that attacks minority Shia Muslims.
In March, the chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, triggered a storm of criticism after he publicly called on the Taliban not to attack Punjab because his party shared some of the militants’ ideas. Sharif said his remarks were taken out of context. Sharif is the brother of Nawaz Sharif, whose party rules Punjab Province but is in opposition nationally.
The urgency of tackling extremism in Punjab increased last month after a vicious assault on two mosques of the Ahmadi sect in Lahore in which 94 people died.
Security officials blamed the attack on the “Punjabi Taliban” — shorthand for an assortment of extremist groups based in hundreds of hardline madrasas across the province.
Analysts say militants in Punjab are becoming increasingly powerful by coordinating their attacks with Taliban counterparts based in Waziristan in the tribal belt, the area in the northwest of the country with considerable autonomy from the rest of Pakistan.
Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which was nurtured by Pakistani intelligence in the 1990s to attack Indian troops in Kashmir, does not carry out attacks inside Pakistan and is not directly linked to the Taliban, but its leadership is taking advantage of the permissive environment. Last Sunday, Hafiz Saeed, its leader, appeared at an anti-Israel rally in Lahore, the provincial capital, with leaders of the main religious parties.
“He’s a free man,” Amir Rana, a militancy analyst said. “He’s visiting madrasas, he’s addressing rallies, whatever the topic, religious or political.”
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