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India-Pakistan

What's Cooking in the Jihadi Kitchen?

2006-11-05

From South Asia Analysis Group, an article by B. Raman, Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. ... The Government has decided to expel all foreign students staying in Pakistan without no-objection certificates from their own countries, Interior Secretary Syed Kamal Shah said on August 8, 2006. .... about 700 foreign students were studying in religious schools and universities in the country. About a half of them had not obtained NOCs from their countries and, therefore, they would be repatriated. .... A top official of the Ittehad Tanzeematul Madaris-e-Deeniya Pakistan (ITMDP), a confederacy of five religious education boards running over 14,000 seminaries across Pakistan, said on August 12,2006, that the Government had agreed it would not pressure madressahs in the aftermath of the great London plot (to blow up US-bound planes) that was foiled by the UK authorities with active help from Islamabad. Seminaries across the country have been worried and pushed the ITMDP leadership to secure assurances from Islamabad that they would not face action as they did after the 7/7 London bombings. .... Despite some clues leading to Pakistani seminaries in last year’s London bombing investigations, no seminary was involved in the act and time had proved this. .... A UK-based Islamic charity organisation remitted a huge amount of money to three individuals in three different bank accounts in Mirpur, Azad Kashmir, in December last year with the sole purpose of helping its recipients and their organisations carry out the aircraft bombing plan in the UK, insider sources told Daily Times. .... One of these banks is UK based and has its presence in Azad Kashmir because of a huge number of British citizens of Kashmir origin in UK. The money was transferred from UK to banks in Azad Kashmir through Barclays Plc. Two of the recipients of the transaction are British citizens of Kashmir origin while the third is an Islamabad-based builder, also of Kashmir origin. They were arrested in the last two weeks at three different places in the country. ....

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India-Pakistan

Pak madrassahs to evade scrutiny in UK plot

2006-08-13

KARACHI: A top official of the Ittehad Tanzeematul Madaris-e-Deeniya Pakistan (ITMDP), a confederacy of five religious education boards running over 14,000 seminaries across Pakistan, said on Saturday that the government had agreed it would not pressure madressahs in the aftermath of the great London plot that was foiled by the UK authorities with active help from Islamabad. Seminaries across the country have been worried and pushed the ITMDP leadership to secure assurances from Islamabad that they would not face action as they did after the 7/7 London bombings. “We have been assured that the recent London incident would not create pressure for us,” Hanif Jalandhari, chief of the Wafaq-ul-Madaris, the largest of the five religious education boards, which controls more than 9,000 seminaries, told Daily Times. Insiders said in the first ever meeting of the ITMDP with the interior minister Friday the two sides remained confined to the concerns about possible action against seminaries. “The government has agreed not to take any action against the seminaries for the time being,” said an insider, but Jalandhari has insisted that it was not “a matter of time” but the minister had assured them that no action was in the offing against seminaries because unlike the 7/7 incidents no clue was leading to Pakistani seminaries in the latest incident. Jalandhari said that despite some clues leading to Pakistani seminaries in last year’s London bombing investigations, no seminary was involved in the act and time had proved this. “And even this time no clues are there to justify any government action against our seminaries,” he said. "Nope. Nope. No clues here. Don't even need to look around. As pure as the driven snow, are the Pak madaris. Trust me." He said he was satisfied with the assurances given by the government according to which foreign students enrolled at Pakistani seminaries would be given re-entry visas once they returned after their vacations and none of them would be expelled before they completed their studies. However, the government has not agreed on visas to fresh students and Jalandhari said talks would continue to settle that issue. A source in the interior ministry said that the government would not issue re-entry visas to foreign students without thorough investigations and would decide this on a case-to-case basis.

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India-Pakistan

Madrassa convention refuses to expel international students

2006-01-26

A convention organised on Wednesday by the Ittehad Tanzeematul Madaris-e-Deeniya Pakistan (ITMDP), a confederacy of five education boards, said they would never succumb to government pressure to expel their foreign students and would continue to resist the authorities. The convention was also attended by the top leaders of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), who hinted at a possible joint agitation with the ITMDP against the government. “We have been resisting the government’s intentions to expel international students in our seminaries and will never succumb to the government’s pressure in the future,” Qari Hanif Jalandhari, a central ITMDP leader, said at a press conference at the Binori Town mosque after the convention. He said the convention condemned the removal of the mode of Namaz from the Islamiyat textbooks. The authorities scrapped it on the pretext of sectarian strife in the Northern Areas, which was not the real reason, he maintained. “In fact, the government changed the Islamiyat curriculum at the behest of its Western masters,” said Dr Sarfaraz Naeemi, secretary general of the ITMDP.

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