After lying low for over a year due to the scrutiny of its leaders in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, Jamaat-ud-Dawah, the frontal outfit of Lashkar-e-Tayiba, has stepped up its activities and unveiled plans to hold major conferences of Pakistani jihadi groups on Kashmir this week.
The 'Yakjaiti-e-Kashmir' (Kashmir Solidarity) conference organised by the JuD in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir capital Muzaffarabad on Thursday is expected to be attended by Hizbul Mujahideen commander Syed Salahuddin, JuD leader Abdul Rehman Makki and former Inter-Services Intelligence agency chief Hamid Gul.
JuD chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the mastermind of the Mumbai attacks, will address another "Kashmir Solidarity" conference to be held in Islamabad on Friday.
JuD is the frontal outfit of Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is responsible for the Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people. After the 26/11 strikes, the UN banned the JuD and its chief Saeed was placed under house arrest but was subsequently released.
The conference in Muzaffarabad is being held after a gap of several years as such gatherings were not permitted by authorities after former military ruler Pervez Musharraf clamped down on jihadi groups following an assurance to New Delhi that Pakistani soil would not be used for anti-India activities.
Leaders of jihadi groups, including General Abdullah, Sheikh Jameel Ahmed and Ghulam Muhammad Safi, will address the meet in Muzaffarabad. It will be presided over by Abdul Aziz Alvi, the chief of the PoK chapter of the JuD.
Alvi was briefly detained by authorities in his home in Muzaffarabad in December 2008 after the JuD was declared a front for the Lashkar-e-Tayiba by the UN Security Council.
In the past few weeks, the JuD has also resumed issuing statements to the media via email on behalf of jehadi and radical organisations.
The release of such statements had virtually stopped following intense focus on its activities over the past year. Recently, the JuD issued two statements on behalf of a grouping of radical organisations that asked the Pakistan government to expel the Norwegian ambassador following the publication of blasphemous cartoons of Prophet Mohammed by a newspaper in Norway.
Senior JuD leader Maulana Ameer Hamza was quoted in one of the statements as saying that Pakistan 'is a nuclear and missile power and we should not hesitate to use this power to protect the honour' of Prophet Mohammed.
Members of Falah-e-Insaniyat, a front for the JuD, too have stepped up their activities like the collection of donations across Pakistan, including the federal capital. During the Eid-ul-Azha festival in November, the Falah-e-Insaniyat set up camps across Islamabad to collect skins of sacrifice animals. These skins are later sold to raise funds for the organisation.
Following the Mumbai attacks, Pakistani leaders like Interior Minister Rehman Malik had said the JuD had been banned.
Top JuD leaders, including Hafiz Saeed, were detained or placed under house arrest only to be subsequently released. During the hearing of a case related to Saeed's detention in the Lahore High Court last year, the government admitted that no formal notification was issued to ban the JuD.
