Campus terror in Pakistan
Vice chancellors in Pakistan often get beaten up by Islami Jamiat Talaba (IJT, student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami) thugs till they learn to coexist with it. There are no liberal faculty members who can survive and teach on campuses. Many IJT student leaders rose to political eminence despite murder cases pending against them. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who planned the 9/11 attack, was arrested from the house of a "women's wing" leader of the Jamaat in Rawalpindi in March 2003. Another al-Qaeda leader, Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in March 2002 from Faisalabad, was given shelter by Hafiz Saeed's Jamaat-ud-Dawa and the Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The Lahore daily, Pakistan Today editorialised in 2012: "The conservative Islamic political party Jamaat-e-Islami has established itself in many public educational institutions under the guise of a student political wing, resorting to violence in order to get their way. A complete silence, and in some cases backing, of the faculty has also made it easier for IJT to establish itself in PU." The only time the Jamaat did not support IJT violence was after the latter beat up Imran Khan when he was visiting the PU campus. The then chief of the Jamaat, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, landed up at Khan's home to apologise and later led Khan's father's funeral prayers. Qazi's wisdom paid off: Khan's government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is ruling in tandem with the Jamaat.
Lahore was considered immune to the kind of terrorism being experienced by Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta, headquarters of the three other provinces. But last month, it was in Lahore that al-Qaeda was found operating its communications headquarters, from a large property that no one cared to check. Lahore is more like Islamabad, where al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists could be hiding in the outskirts, which have nearly 1,00,000 illegal squatters (most of them Pakhtun-Afghan), unplanned mosques, and the Arab-funded International Islamic University, where the founder of al-Qaeda, Abdullah Azzam, used to teach, and where al-Qaeda killers take sharia courses today.
In August, six terrorists, including four women, were arrested in Green Town in Lahore. Intelligence officials told reporters, "Al-Qaeda was operating an illegal gateway exchange, under the name of International Technical Hub, from [a] residence receiving signals from Afghanistan". Additionally, weapons were found in the compound, which could have been used to keep kidnapped citizens before they were taken to the north for some destination in the tribal areas or Afghanistan.
Then, the Islamabad Police caught Hammad Adil, the Waziristan-trained upper-class mastermind of al-Qaeda. Adil, together with Abdullah Umar, the son of an army colonel who was dismissed for his terrorist affiliation, killed a senior officer of the Federal Investigation Agency who was prosecuting suspects in the famous 2008 Mumbai case, which involved terrorists from Pakistan whose confessions had cut very close to state involvement...
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