Recent Appearances...

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Recent Appearances...

India-Pakistan

Tablighi Jamaat Leader in India, Maulana Saad Kandhlawi Arrested

2020-04-09

Rolled over because it was posted late yesterday. Remember, guys, the cut-off is supposed to be 2:00 p.m. ET (EDT now) unless it is an active and ongoing terror attack, or possibly red revolution. So if your article is not as important as that, please click on the Tomorrow button when you post it.

[OpIndia] Delhi police trace Nizamuddin Markaz Chief Maulana Saad, will be interrogated after completion of the quarantine period

Which means, because the judiciary can't be bothered to venture out of their micro-palaces right now, warrants for the official interrogation will not be issued, and he'll experience the jovial nature of several agencies wishing to talk to him until he can be presented before a magistrate.

The Chief of Nizamuddin Markaz Maulana Saad Khandalvi has been traced by Delhi police to be living in the Zakir Nagar area and has put himself under quarantine.

Delhi police are planning to interrogate Maulana Saad but will conduct it only after completion of his quarantine period. According to his lawyers, he has put himself under self-quarantine and that's why he is unable to join the investigation now.

Maulana Saad is booked under The Epidemics Act 1897
Perhaps the first musalmaan to achieve the distinction of 'akin to Protozoa'.
for allowing religious congregation in the month of March despite repeated warnings from the center and the state government. He disregarded the guidelines issued by the government in the light of the Wuhan coronavirus epidemic which is spreading rapidly. Maulana Saad is wanted in an offence lodged by the Delhi Police under sections of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 and sections of the Indian Penal Code, for violating government directions on steps to be taken for avoiding the spread of Wuhan Coronavirus.
More charges, including money laundering and terrorism will follow.
As thousands of people from across the country and many from abroad attended the religious congregation, the event has now emerged as a hotspot for the maximum cases of coronavirus as over 1300 of the total number of Tabligh Jamaatis has been traced back to the event and their contacts. Nearly 25,000 people have been quarantined by the government of India.

Delhi Police crime branch has sent two notices to Saad under Section 91 of CrPC. The police have asked Maulana Saad to provide some documents. The second notice was sent after the first notice was found "unsatisfactory".

As Muhammad Saad remained untraceable, the Delhi police slapped a notice with the 36 questions at his farmhouse in Shamli near Delhi. After the first notice was found unsatisfactory, the Delhi police slapped the second issue.
The cheek.
Investigative agencies have started probing into the sources of funding and financial aid received by the conservative Islamist organization. The Delhi Police have also started probing into the finances of the organization which came under the national limelight after organising a congregation at its Delhi centre at Markaz Nizamuddin where 1700-3000 people are believed to have participated in the event, in flagrant violation of the restrictive orders.

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Bangladesh

Jamiatul Ulama chief urges Tabligh Jamaat to resolve conflicts

2018-04-30

[Dhaka Tribune] Bangladesh Jamaatul Ulama Chairman and imam of Bangladesh’s largest Eid congregation in Sholakia, Kishoreganj Sheikhul Hadis Farid Uddin Masuud has expressed deep concern about the ongoing internal crisis in Tabligh Jamaat.

If the situation is not resolved soon, it will cause irrevocable damage to the Ummah, he said in a statement issued on Sunday.

"Everyone needs to come forward to solve the crisis and maintain unity among Tabligh Jamaat. It is necessary for the Ulama-e-Kiram to sustain a good relationship between themselves," Farid Uddin said.

"Everyone will need to maintain peace and order to keep the works of Tabligh active."

Urging all to solve the crises sensibly, the imam further said: "General people and the Ulama-e-Kiram have always helped each other. They cannot be competitors to each other. It is to be noted that the fatwa declared by Darul Uloom Deoband does not permit anyone to create chaos.

"In this case, we should limit our activities according to the statements made by Darul Uloom Deoband. Maintaining a strict position will not bring good results for anyone; rather, it will impede the works of Tabligh and Islam."

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Bangladesh

Showdown at Kakrail mosque

2018-04-29

[Dhaka Tribune] Another round of conflict took place at Kakrail mosque on Saturday between the supporters of Indian Tabligh Jamaat

...the missionary arm of the Deobandi (Salafist) movement in the Indian subcontinent, “The Outreach Society” is estimated by various parties to have between 12million and 150million members worldwide, and to be a solid contributor of men and money to the various jihadi organizations that we follow here at Rantburg...

leader Maulana Muhammad Saad Al Kandhalvi and their opponents.

As the situation escalated, police had to be deployed and the fighting parties were evicted from the mosque by the law enforcement, HM Azimul Haque, additional commissioner of police (Ramna Zone), said.

He said the police will take steps to mediate the matter by making both parties sit down for a peaceful dialogue.

According to Zunayed Siddique, who is aligned with the Tabligh Jamaat, their opposition apparently occupied the mosque with the assistance of Qawmi madrasah students.

There have been reports of attacks on Kandhalvi’s supporters, reports UNB.

Saad Kandhalvi is one of the major leaders of Tabligh Jamaat, which is the largest organization of Sunni Muslims in the subcontinent. Last year, Saad made several remarks which angered his peers, particularly among the Bangladesh chapter, which led to thousands protesting against his attendance in the Bishwa Ijtema this year.

Hefazat-e-Islam is one of Kandhalvi’s biggest opposition in Bangladesh over his comments about the Sunnah and the Quran and his declaration of the being the sole head of the Tabligh Jamaat body.

During the previous altercation, the home minister had to personally intervene to resolve the situation before it escalated further.

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Bangladesh

RAB: Militants were planning to ship bombs on cargo vessels

2017-04-29

[Dhaka Tribune] Three turbans including a close associate of Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury were tossed in the clink
Drop the rod and step away witcher hands up!
by RAB on Thursday night from Savar.

Rapid Action Battalion

(RAB) found firearms and bomb-making materials in their possession and said they are members of a new faction of the banned myrmidon outfit Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh, New JMB’s Sarwar-Tamim group.

The three men have been identified as Tamim Dwari alias Abdullah Al Hasan alias Azizur Rahman alias Abdullah Al Jafri alias Amir Hamza alias Al Huzaifa alias Sri Gowrango Kumar Mandol, 32,

...but his poor old mother just called him Son....

Kamrul Hasan alias Kajol alias Nur Uddin, 26, and Md Mostofa Mozumder alias Shihab alias Hamza, 32.

RAB Legal and Media Wing Director Mufti Mahmud Khan confirmed their arrest yesterday during a presser, saying: "Acting on a tip-off we searched a bus at Rajfulbaria bus stand coming from Paturia launch terminal where we apprehended the three members of Sarwar-Tamim group around 10pm on Thursday.

"We found one foreign-made pistol, five rounds of bullets, 1.15kg of plastic explosives made with the help of a bomb expert, a lot of bomb-making materials, three folding knives, one machete, laptops and foreign currencies in their possession."

RAB said the three came to Dhaka to carry out subversive activities.

The close associate of Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury, the criminal mastermind behind the Gulshan terror attack, is Tamim Dwari, a Hindu convert and a marine engineer, who was devising a plan to transport bomb-making materials and other weapons on shipping boats with Tamin Ahmed Chowdhury, said RAB.

RAB also said they were recruiting trustworthy members of the group to help transport these bombs with fake passports and visas.

Tamim and Tamim: Brothers in arms
Tamim Dwari was radicalised sometime in 2003, according to RAB, after making friends with a man called Tanvir Kabir and attending the Tabligh Jamaat with him. After studying at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology in 2005, he transferred to the Chittagong Marine Academy and finished his degree in 2007.

In 2013, while working as a marine engineer on the fat merchantman Banglar Kakoli, Tamim Dwari found a former university friend Abu Baker on a voyage to Pakistain. Their conversations circled around global prosecution of Moslems and what they could do about that to which Abu Baker suggested jihad was the only way.

In December 2013, Abu Bakar introduced Tamim Dwari to Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury as the man who had come from abroad to fight jihad in Bangladesh.

RAB’s Mufti Mahmud said this initial meeting had a deep impact on Tamim Dwari who invited Tamim to visit him in Chittagong.

In January 2014, they met at Patenga, Chittagong where Dwari showed Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury around the fat merchantman Banglar Doot where they discussed at length the ways in which they would transport bombs and bomb-making materials along with recruitments of trustworthy turbans and how they could acquire fake passports and visas for them.

In mid-2014, they met again in Dhaka in a flat in Mirpur DOHS along with Mir Farhad, Ashraf, Himel, Abdullah, Abu Bakar and three other unknown turbans to plan myrmidon attacks across the country.

RAB’s Mufti Mahmud said in July 2015 Tamim Dwari was admitted to the International Maritime Training Academy but dropped out and joined the general fat merchantman Bashundhara-4 in August 2016 to hide his deep involvement with militancy.

In November 2016, he was most likely fired and he said to have left home for hizrat (leaving home for jihad) in January 2017.

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Southeast Asia

Indonesians detained at Woodlands claimed to be preachers: Malaysian police

2017-01-13

[CHANNELNEWSASIA] Eight Indonesians held at Singapore's Woodlands Checkpoint said they were preachers from the Tabligh Jamaat Islamic group, a senior Malaysian counter-terrorism official told Channel NewsAsia on Thursday (Jan 12).

Preachers. Simple preachers. Heavily-armed, simple preachers...

One of the eight, identified as Ridce Elfi Hendra, was found with one image of a shoe bomb and two images of Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
(IS), said Ayub Khan Mydin Pitchay, principal assistant director of Special Branch’s counter-terrorism division.

"They claimed to be preachers from the Tablighi Jamaat
A group of itinerant Deobandi preachers who form one of al-Qaeda's recruiting arms...
movement, which is also sometimes known as Tabligh. They said they have been preaching in madrasahs (religious boarding schools) in Pattani, southern Thailand and then travelled down to Malaysia’s state of Perlis. They later came to Malacca to meet with a preacher there," said Ayub.

Tabligh Jamaat is a global Sunni Moslem missionary group.

"We will be investigating the madrasahs and the preacher whom they met with," Ayub added.

The men were in Malaysia from Jan 3 to 10 and claimed they were from Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia.

A senior Indonesian counter-terrorism official told Channel NewsAsia that "initial interrogation showed they were not IS members".

"They are just preachers. This is the result of our initial investigation," said the Indonesian official.

Ayub said the men tried to enter Singapore at 1.30am on Jan 10 and were detained by Singapore’s immigration authorities and deported to Malaysia. They were held by Malaysia’s Special Branch counter-terrorism officers at 2am.

They were deported to Indonesia’s island of Batam at 9am that same day and handed over to Indonesian police counter-terrorism taskforce Densus 88.

DEPORTEE HAD IMAGES OF SHOE BOMB, IS FIGHTERS

Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) confirmed on Thursday evening that the eight Indonesians - aged between 16 and 37 - were deported to Malaysia on Jan 10.

"One of them was found in possession of images of security concern, including that of a shoe-bomb as well as fighters from the terrorist group that calls itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria," MHA said.

"The Singapore authorities informed their Malaysian counterparts before the deportation," added a spokesperson for MHA.

According to Ayub, the Tabligh movement's teachings in Malaysia have been mostly peaceful and moderate.

"There have been only one or two cases at the most where its followers were found to be radical. They joined Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) and the Malaysian Mujahidin Movement (KMM)," said Ayub.

JI is the regional terror group behind the devastating 2002 Bali bombings. KMM, which is also known as the Malaysian Militant Movement, is a turban group with links to JI, which believes in overthrowing the secular Malaysian government and replacing it with an Islamic state.

Tabligh has been described by Moslem scholars as apolitical and somewhat secretive. It was founded in 1927.

Its biggest annual event is a three-day prayer and fast held in Bangladesh that attracts millions and is believed to be one of the largest gatherings of Moslems in the world after the Haj pilgrimage.

Link

Bangladesh

Tabligh Jamaat ameer killed in Sylhet

2015-05-19

[Dhaka Tribune] Some person or persons unknown killed Sylhet city unit ameer of Tablighi Jamaat
A group of itinerant Deobandi preachers who form one of al-Qaeda's recruiting arms...
in Sowdagortula area.

Police recovered body of Ibrahim Abu Khalil, 55, which was slitted by throat yesterday morning.

Police have detained his first wife and their son for interrogation.

Assistant Deputy Commissioner (media) of Sylhet Metropolitan Police Rohmot Ullah said: "He might have been murdered over family dispute. Injury marks have been noticed on his neck and stomach.

"Assailants tied up his hands and legs and murdered him sometime on Sunday night," he said.

He said: "Ibrahim had three wives and owned a lot of land properties."

Family members said Ibrahim had returned to the country from a Tabligh Jamaat in India two days back. He went to sleep in his room after having dinner on Sunday night.

Later, the family members found his body after entering the room on Monday morning.

He said the body was recovered and sent to Osmani Medical College morgue for an appointment with Dr. Quincy.

Ibrahim's son Sajid said the assailants have taken way a laptop and gold ornaments.

Link

Bangladesh

JMB finds friends in outlawed parties

2010-04-25

Where else would they look?
Banned Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh has approached a new strategy to regain its strength and is trying to develop ties with different groups including the outlawed parties.

Because when you're one of the uncool kids, hanging out with those even less cool will make you cooler.

Officials of Rapid Action Battalion fighting militancy say they have already marked and broke a link between JMB and outlawed Gono Bahini.
I'll bet the shutter gun got a real workout, too ...
"The JMB contacted an outlawed group for firearms but failed as we detected and dismantled the link," Rab Director (intelligence wing) Lt Col Ziaul Ahsan told The Daily Star.

Rab sources say JMB was left in ruins following the execution of its six top brass leaders in 2007 and constant arrest of other leaders and operatives. But now the outfit might try to establish a relation with other banned outfits like Harkatul Jihad al Islami, Hizb-ut Tahrir and even the war criminals to regain strength.
Birds of a feather ...
The sources add they have information that JMB Shura member Sohel Mahfuz, who hails from Charsreekal village in Kumarkhali upazila, Kushtia, sought firearms several times from top Gono Bahini leader Ashraful Islam alias Mandar about a month ago.

Mandar was eventually spotted and killed in a "shootout" with the Rab members in Kushtia on April 7.
RAB spotted him, grabbed him, cuffed him, put him in the back of a 2-1/2 ton truck, drove to the banana grove in Kushtia, put a round of bullet behind each ear, rolled him out the back of the truck, retrieved the cuffs, carefully planted the shutter gun, took pictures, retrieved said shutter gun, lit cigars, drove back home, wiped down shutter gun, put shutter gun in velvet case, finished cigars, returned shutter gun to Sergeant Chaudhray at the RAB lock-up, transmitted pics to RAB PR department, filed expenses, and went home to bed.

Whew! It's a good thing they're fit, with such a schedule.

Interestingly, JMB came to limelight for its so-called outlaw cleansing operation in 2003 under the banner Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB) in different northwestern districts.

Several ministers of the then ruling four-party alliance government and party leaders patronised JMJB in the vigilante operations that left several people dead.

Meanwhile, Rab officials say JMB is still running its invitational activities in limited scale in all district and divisional headquarters despite being almost in a fragile state. Its invitation wing members are targeting students of schools, colleges and madrasas for recruitment. The JMB members are however a bit more active in the districts of Rajshahi, Rangpur, Mymensingh, Kishoreganj and Comilla, they observe.

Some recently held JMB operatives revealed these to the crime busting force during interrogation, Rab officials say.

Lt Col Ziaul Ahsan said, "Some arrested JMB operatives admitted that their operatives hiding in district towns as rickshaw-pullers or hotel boys continue 'dawati' activities in mosques in limited scale posing as Tabligh Jamaat men."

He added JMB members first target simpleton students from madrasas, schools and colleges in guise of Tabligh men. When they think their targets have become infatuated with Islam, the militants invite them to join JMB.

He however said JMB is running this activity very secretly and in a very limited scale as the outfit is under constant surveillance of Rab. The elite force, however, could not give the exact number of active JMB leaders and operatives.

Former military wing commander of JMB "Boma" Mizan during interrogation said the outfit has around 100 Eshar (in-charge of a certain area) members, 500 Gayeri Ehsar (active members) and around 1,000 general members and 2,000 supporters across the country. Mizan was arrested on May 14 last year.

The Rab has so far arrested 558 JMB members. Of them, 13 are Majlish-e-Shura members, 112 Ehsar members and the rest are Gayeri Ehsar or general members or supporters.

Link

Bangladesh

22 held in Barisal on suspicion

2009-04-24

[Bangla Daily Star] Rapid Action Battalion (Rab) arrested 22 people, including 21 female, in Barisal yesterday. Some religious books were seized from their possession.

Rab officials at a press briefing said they were arrested on suspicion of criminal activities. Rab handed them over to Kotwali Police Station after daylong interrogation.

An 18-member team of Rab-8 led by Lt Commander KM Mamunur Rashid in the morning arrested Jalil and two women at a house near Rab's Rupatoli office. Later, the team rounded up another 19 while holding a meeting at a house at New Circular Road.

The arrestees claimed that they are Tabligh Jamaat>Tabligh Jamaat members and came to attend Tabligh and Talim from different areas of the region and other districts.

Safura Khatun, 71, a resident of New Circular Road of the city, told The Daily Star that Rab detained them from the house of Rashu Begum. Rashu resides in Dhaka and Tabligh Jamaat is using her house for last 10 years, Safura said.

Hayatul Islam Khan, assistant commissioner of Barisal Metropolitan Police, told The Daily Star that the arrestees would be produced before judicial magistrate court under section 54 of CrPC for their suspicious movements.

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Britain

My persecution by the Muslim McCarthyites

2009-04-10

By Taj Hargey

This week I not only won a libel case in the High Court but a victory against religious fanaticism within Britain's Muslim community. Muslim Weekly, a conservative newspaper, had falsely accused me of belonging to a heterodox sect and therefore being a heretic. I was apparently less of a Muslim than the readers of that paper.

As the head of a progressive Muslim organisation in Britain that is dedicated to an enlightened, egalitarian and erudite Islam, I was victimised, like other forward-looking Muslims, by a campaign of classic McCarthyism. Just as Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined the lives of countless Americans during the 1950s when he and his committee smeared innocent people as communists, the Muslim hierarchy in Britain have used witchhunts to maintain their unquestioned theological power. Any Muslim freethinker is automatically branded as heretical or un-Islamic and excommunicated from the community - and debate is shut down.

I hope that my public vindication in the courts will embolden more progressives, dissenters and particularly thinking women to put their heads above the parapet and challenge the fundamentalist mullahs. Only then can we loosen the deadly grip of the self-appointed religious fraternity on what it is to be a Muslim in Britain.

Unfortunately, Islam in Britain has been taken over by the followers of a warped manifestation of the faith. The Muslim Council of Britain, the main Muslim newspapers and many of the big mosques are dominated by men who subscribe to a virulent and backward-looking brand of Islam that has been exported from the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent.

We need a reformation that saves Islam from foreign-inspired zealots. That reformation is already under way, with Muslims going back to the pristine teaching of the transcendent Koran, not taking on trust the hadith (a compilation of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad recorded some 250 years after his death by non-Arabs) or the corpus of medieval man-made Sharia (religious law). But because this reformation is still in its infancy, the reactionary clergy and its supporters is doing everything to strangle it.

Most if not all the thorny problems of faith that British Muslims face today - whether it is apostasy, blasphemy, jihad, women's oppression, homosexuality, religious intolerance or the democratic deficit in and outside the community - can be traced either to fabricated hadith or the masculine-biased Sharia.

Although the Koran repeatedly declares that God's revelation is conclusive and sufficient guidance for Muslims and that there is no need for any supplementary legal authority in Islam, the traditional Muslim clergy defies this explicit divine assurance. They falsely convince their flock that they cannot be true believers without the hadith. They falsely assert that this source of Islam is at the heart of being a real Muslim. Most Muslims have been told that the hadith are the sacred authentic words of the Prophet, but the plethora of fictitious and forged hadith proves otherwise.

Granted, there may be some useful guidance in the thousands upon thousands of hadith but they need to pass a rigorous double test. First, they cannot contradict the Koran and, second, they must not defy reason and logic. Unfortunately, most Muslims have been programmed to regard hadith as sacrosanct teachings that cannot be challenged. This holds all Muslims hostage to the antiquated prejudices or distortions of the narrators and recorders of the prophetic traditions.

The rampant oppression of women in Muslim society does not stem from the Koran but is chiefly the product of misogynistic hadith. For example, a famous authentic hadith declares that there will be a preponderance of women in Hell. But the facts here on earth suggest otherwise - male criminality far exceeds that of females.

These anti-Koranic perspectives will continue to predominate in the British Muslim community as it becomes more directly tied to ultra-conservative and extremist sects - such as the Wahhabi, Deobandi, Jamati Islami and the Tabligh Jamaat. These ideological radicals propagate a highly toxic caricature of Islam. They regard creed and culture as indistinguishable, refusing to grasp that Islam is a global religion, not a faith that is linked to one particular people or place.

Although Muslims have their own specific territorial cultural traditions, there is no such thing as an Islamic culture. Therefore the modern trend among British Muslims blindly to emulate Arab ethnic dress or grow beards or for women to wear the Wahhabi-sanctioned niqab or face masks has nothing to do with the Koran but everything to do with the primitive tribal mores and sexist practices of Arabia.

The relentless importation of Wahhabi-influenced theology and tradition into the body politic of the Muslim community is mainly the result of two factors. First, the Saudis control Mecca and Medina, the centres of Islam. This gives the Wahhabi Saudis both a spurious legitimacy and a captive market to peddle their sectarian poison.

Second, with their petrodollars the Saudis can afford to export the most horrendous brand of Islam around the globe. Here in Britain, conservative mosques and madrassas receive funding from the despotic Saudis and in turn extol their nefarious interpretation of Islam.

It is essential therefore that all thinking Muslims resist this foreign theological imposition and create a British Islam that is not only faithful to the original uplifting teachings of the faith but one that is natural to and at home in modern British society.

Dr Taj Hargey is the chair of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford and the Imam of the Summertown Islamic Congregation in Oxford

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Europe

Spain arrests 14 on suspicion of plotting attack on Barcelona

2008-01-20

MADRID: Spain was on high alert for terrorist attacks on Saturday after the police arrested 14 suspects of Pakistani and Indian origin who authorities contend were plotting an attack on Barcelona, officials said.

Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, the interior minister, told reporters that the 14 had been arrested in Barcelona, the capital of the Catalonia region in the northeast, and that more arrests were expected. The police, who acted with the help of information from foreign intelligence agencies, raided several apartments, a prominent mosque and a small prayer hall, Rubalcaba and local Muslim representatives said.

Rubalcaba would not say which countries' intelligence services had provided information. He said the police had confiscated material for making explosives, including four timing devices, in the raids. The detainees were Islamists who "belonged to a well-organized group that had gone a step beyond radicalization," he said. "When someone has timers in their home, you have no option but to think violent acts are being planned," he said.

With a general election set for March 9, Spanish authorities are on the alert for terrorist attacks by Islamist groups or the Basque militant group ETA.

Muslim representatives in the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona said the police raided the Torek Ben Ziad mosque, one of the city's most prominent mosques, about 3 a.m. One Muslim leader in Barcelona, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue, said the arrested men belonged to Tabligh Jamaat, a Pakistan-based group. The group publicizes a benign strain of revivalist Islam but is suspected by Western intelligence agencies to be a recruiting ground for jihadists.

Spanish and international intelligence officials say they are worried the growing Pakistani population in Spain is becoming a new European link in the global terrorism network.

One way to deal with the problem is to stop allowing the Paks into your country. Sucks for the Paks who aren't involved with terrorism, but it would certainly focus world attention on the problem.

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India-Pakistan

Tablighi Jamaat convention hits town

2007-11-20

The New York Times plays softball with yet another jihadi recruitment organization.

For six days they came: hundreds of thousands of ~~turbans~~ Pakistani men squashed onto a barren rice field, dressed in baggy trousers, crocheted caps on their heads, sandals on their feet and long beards a common feature. They prayed five times a day, listened to preachers, ate by the flicker of oil lamps and slept ~~with each other~~, cheek by jowl, on the hard ground.

By Sunday night, the annual convention of the Pakistan-based group Tabligh Jamaat, the largest gathering of Muslims outside Mecca, had come to an end without incident. That, in itself, was remarkable this year: amid the current political crisis, the government had banned all large gatherings and had broken up several others by force.

It was also remarkable because the group, though it publicizes a benign strain of revivalist Islam and is held in wide esteem in many parts of the world, is suspected by Western intelligence agencies to be a recruiting ground for jihadists. The agencies say that among those who have passed through the group were three Western men who have been convicted on terrorism-related charges: John Walker Lindh, Richard Reid and Jose Padilla.

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