Pakistan bans Hafiz Saeed’s JuD and FIF, arrests Jaish chief Masood Azhar’s brother and son 

Hafiz Saeed.

New Delhi: A day after the Indian media reported the Mumbai terror attack mastermind, Hafiz Saeed-led Jamaat-ud-Dawa and its wing, Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation, continue to be only on the watchlist, the two terror outfits were formally placed in the list of banned organizations, on Tuesday.

JuD and FIF were among 70 organizations prescribed by the country’s interior ministry under the country’s Anti-Terrorism Act 1997. A note at the bottom Pakistan’s National Counter Terrorism Authority list said: “This list is updated as of March 5, 2019, and prepared by NACTA based on the notifications issued by the ministry of interior.”

The Pakistan government has also frozen assets of all UN designated organizations like JuD, FIF.

The NCTA has so far declared 70 terrorist organizations as banned and a sizeable number of these organizations are based in Baluchistan, Gilgit-Baltistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Pakistan interior minister Shaharyar Afridi in a news conference announced that it has arrested 44 people associated with multiple banned terrorist groups including Mufti Abdul Rauf Asghar and Hammad Azhar, who are respectively the brother and son of Jaish founder and chief Masood Azhar.

The terrorists have been detained for a period of two weeks after Pakistan had assured the international community that it will take strict action against terror.

Pakistani officials also claimed that the move was not made under pressure from India but was based on the decision taken by the country’s “National Action Plan” committee.

Indicating that a crackdown against militant groups was imminent, Pakistan’s information minister Fawad Chaudhry said, “A full-fledged strategy is now in place. We have different strategies for different groups, but the main aim is that we have to enforce the writ of the state. We have to demilitarize if there are groups (on our soil).”

After the Jaish-e-Muhammed-claimed Pulwama suicide bombing on a CRPF convoy, Indian warplanes bombed a Jaish terrorcamp deep inside Pakistan, which triggered Pakistani aerial retaliation. This put both the countries on the brink of a large-scale military confrontation.

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