It said the government has been taking over the control of the mosques, seminaries and other institutions of the banned organisations in the province.
Pakistan authorities on Thursday sealed the Lahore headquarters of Hafiz Saeed-led Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and its charity wing Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FIF) as part of the ongoing crackdown against the banned organisations.
“Under the National Action Plan (NAP), the government has taken complete control of the banned JuD and FIF headquarters in Lahore and Muridkey,” said a statement issued by the Punjab Home department Thursday.
It said the government has been taking over the control of the mosques, seminaries and other institutions of the banned organisations in the province.
“We have intensified action against the banned organisations,” it said.
A senior government official told PTI that the authorities have sealed the Jamia Masjid Qadsia, the Lahore headquarters of the JuD and FIF.
The official said the government has also taken over the complete control of the JuD headquarters in Muridke, some 40-km from Lahore. However, the home department did not confirm it.
The official further said that Saeed and his supporters did not protest when the administration and police reached there to take over the control of the building.
“Saeed along with his supporters left for his Jauhar Town residence,” he said. The whereabouts of Saeed was immediately not known.
Saeed was listed under UN Security Council Resolution 1267 in December 2008. He was released from house arrest in Pakistan in November 2017.
According to officials, JuD’s network includes 300 seminaries and schools, hospitals, a publishing house and ambulance service. The two groups have about 50,000 volunteers and hundreds of other paid workers.
Meanwhile, a total of 121 members of the proscribed groups have so far been taken into “preventive detention” across Pakistan, the Interior Ministry announced Thursday.
The new figure of 121 came two days after the ministry said Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar’s son and brother were among 44 members of the banned militant outfits taken into “preventive detention”.
Ministry of Interior Secretary AzamSuleman Khan said on Tuesday that HamadAzhar and Mufti Abdul Raoof were among those detained. Hamad is the son of Masood Azhar while Raoof is his brother.
In a notification, the Interior Ministry said the provincial governments have taken over the management and administrative control of 182 madaris, 34 schools/ colleges as part of the National Action Plan (NAP) to “combat terrorism.”
The Ministry of Interior said law enforcement agencies had taken 121 people into preventive detention as of Thursday in compliance with the NAP, formulated after the attack on an army school in Peshawar in 2014 that killed nearly 150 people, mostly students.
Provincial governments across Pakistan have also taken over five hospitals, 163 dispensaries, 184 ambulances and eight offices, Geo News quoted the notification as saying.
Meanwhile, Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said the government has decided that it will decide on its larger strategy on how to act against proscribed organisations after discussing the matter with other parliamentary leaders.
Addressing a press conference, he said that the leaders of major parties will be taken into confidence on major decisions on banned organisations in the country.
Chaudhry said that a consensus had been built in the country in recent days in response to the “Indian aggression” and the government wanted this consensus to be sustained rather than see it break “over small things”.
He said that these were matters of national interest and the government wanted to move forward with the Opposition, similar to the way it had with various other institutions.