LAHORE, PAKISTAN // Pakistani police plan to arrest a hard line cleric accused by India in the Mumbai terror attacks on charges of raising funds for the banned group he leads, a senior officer said today. Hafiz Muhammad Saeed said his Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a charity that helps victims of natural disasters and the poor. Pakistan banned the group after a UN resolution declared it was a front for the terrorist group Lashkar-i-Taiba, which India and the United States believes carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Police officer Mohammed Tahir said today that two criminal cases had been filed against Mr Saeed because he illegally held a public gathering and raised funds for Jamaat-ud-Dawa in the city of Faisalabad in Punjab province last month. "We will definitely arrest him," Mr Tahir said. A spokesman for Mr Saeed said he had yet to be arrested and that he planned to consult with lawyers. Lashkar, which Mr Saeed helped establish in the late 1980s, is accused of sending the teams of gunmen that rampaged through Mumbai last November in an attack on luxury hotels, a busy train station and other sites.
The three-day siege left 166 people dead. Pakistan arrested Mr Saeed in December after India provided a dossier of evidence in a rare sharing of intelligence. But in June, a Pakistani court freed Mr Saeed from house arrest, saying there was not enough evidence to hold him. India maintains he played a role in the attacks and has called on Pakistan to arrest him. Lashkar is widely believed to have enjoyed the support of elements of Pakistan's security agencies in the 1980s and 1990s because it was sending militants to fight Indian-rule in Kashmir, which Pakistan also claims.
Experts have said history complicates efforts to prosecute Mr Saeed now. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since they were formed in 1947. The Mumbai attacks raised tensions between the two nuclear-armed nations and froze a slow-moving talks aimed at normalising their ties. Pakistani and Indian border guards exchanged fire late yesterday along the frontier in eastern Punjab province, said Pakistan Rangers spokesman Nadeem Raza, who claimed the exchange was initiated from the Indian side. No one was reported injured in the incident.
Last week, India said three rockets fired from Pakistan landed on its side of the border in Punjab state. No one was injured in the attack. Mr Raza denied that charge at the time. Cross border firing incidents have become rarer since a 2003 ceasefire in the Kashmir region, but still occasionally happen. Incidents in Punjab are very rare, but there was no sign that Thursday's had raised tensions between the two countries.
* AP