A court on Friday remanded the head of a banned extremist group in jail for two weeks after he was arrested on suspicion of inciting sectarian hatred.
Malik Ishaq, the leader of the feared Lashkar-e-Jhangvi organisation, which is said to have al Qaeda links, was held for making a “provocative” speech earlier this month.
Ishaq has been implicated in dozens of cases — mostly murder — and was accused of masterminding a 2009 attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore, which wounded seven players and an assistant coach and killed eight Pakistanis. He appeared in court in Lahore on Friday amid tight security and was sent to the city’s Kot Lakhpat jail for 14 days, senior police investigation officer Ejaz Shafi Dogar told AFP. He was detained over a speech he made at a religious school on August 19 in the wake of a rise in sectarian violence between majority Sunni and minority Shiite Muslims.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is regarded as the most extreme Sunni terror group in Pakistan and is accused of killing hundreds of Shiites after its emergence in the early 1990s.
Since his release in July last year after a jail sentence of nearly 14 years, Ishaq has frequently been put under house arrest as his sermons raise sectarian tensions and he was detained in prison for a time late last year.
Ishaq has been acquitted in at least 34 cases and granted bail in 10 others. Maulana Ahmed Ludhianvi, an aide to Ishaq, condemned his arrest as “unjustified” and a “violation” of his human rights. “We will follow legal course to secure his release,” he told AFP. Rights groups say a lack of action from the government has emboldened sectarian militant groups, blamed for the deaths of thousands in past years.
