SIALKOT, Pakistan - Authorities placed a religious leader with suspected links to last year’s terrorist attacks in India under house arrest early yesterday, a senior police official said.
The leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, whose Muslim charity, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, serves as a front for the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, was informed that he was not to move from his house in Lahore, said Chaudry Muhammed Shafiq, the city’s senior police superintendent.
India and the United States have accused Lashkar-e-Taiba of carrying out the attacks last November in Mumbai, India, that left at least 163 people dead.
Police officials in Faisalabad, a city in central Pakistan, charged Saeed last week with hate speech against the state, which falls under a terrorism statute, and the order of house arrest was the first legal move against him in those cases.
Several police officers have been posted at Saeed’s home, Shafiq said in a telephone interview. A spokesman for Saeed, Yahya Mujahid, confirmed that Saeed had been restricted to his house and that he had not led prayers yesterday morning for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
Mujahid said Saeed’s supporters would oppose the house arrest in the courts.
Saeed, a Pakistani citizen, has never been prosecuted in Pakistan in relation to the Mumbai attacks. He was placed under house arrest last fall but that detention order expired.
