Over the weekend, I noted that Pakistan’s “house arrest” of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba / Jamaat-ud-Dawa leader Hafiz Saeed was largely for show. Today, the London Times notes that the Jamaat-ud-Dawa headquarters in the city of Muridke is still open for business.
Pakistan claims that it ordered the closure of JuD’s [Jamaat-ud-Dawa] facilities on Thursday under pressure from India and the United States, which consider the group a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) – the militant group blamed for the Mumbai attack. But when The Times visited the complex in Muridke, 30 miles from the eastern city of Lahore, over the weekend it was functioning normally with no sign of any police presence. Most of the 1,600 students at the complex were away for last week’s Eid holidays, but a dozen or so staff and about 40 others were moving freely around the buildings, none of which was sealed. Mohammed Abbas, 34, also known as Abu Ahsan, the administrator of the complex, said: “We’ve not had any official communication about closing. A lot of parents have been calling, afraid that it will be closed or there could be some violence, but we are telling them to send their children back.”
