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| Canadian newspaper spills the beans | | Lahore's Muridke is training ground for Lashkar jihadis | | B L KAK
NEW DELHI, SEPT. 27: Muridke near Lahore in Pakistan has emerged as a highly important spot in view of the uninterupted activities of the dreaded terrorist organisation, Lashkar-e-Toiba. Acccording to a four-part series in the Canadian daily newspaper, National Post, the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), which has been involved in terrorist activities in Kashmir, is now overtaking Al Qaeda in the danger it poses.
Stewart Bell, who is considered as an 'expert' on security issues, has made a pointed reference to his recent visit to Muridke, Lashkar-e-Toiba's training camp, where he found out from local people how Pakistani jihadis were trained and sent out to engage in terrorist activities in several countries. Bell says that as he tried to go closer to the camp, he was chased away. And he adds that what goes on inside the Muridke compound and others like it is of growing concern to Western governments and certainly to India because for years it has been the training ground for Lashkar-managed terrorist acts in Kashmir.
He wrote in his series of articles of the close links between the LeT and another suspiciously similar group, the Jamaat-ud Dawa. But Abdur Rahman Makki, one of the senior leaders of Jamaat-ud Dawa, was quoted as saying that claims that their organisation was engaged in terrorism was "only Indian propaganda". Accccording to Makki, the group only promoted "the purification of the society, and to build a society on the basis of the Koran and Sunnah".
Another Jamaat-ud-Dawa leader Abdullah Muntazer was quoted as describing that period: "At that time we were close to the Lashkar-e-Toiba and you could say that Lashkar and Jamaat-ud Dawa were the same". After 9/11, both the US and Pakistan banned Lashkar. To evade the consequences of being banned, some experts say Lashkar chief, Hafeez Mohammed Saeed, simply changed the name of his organisation from Lashkar to Jamaat-ud Dawa.
Bell wrote that at least five of 18 people, most of them Pakistani-Canadians, who were arrested in Toronto on June 2 and charged with conspiring to commit terrorist acts in Canada, had been trained at a Lashkar camp. "Over the last two years... some of these (Lashkar) recruits have been Westerners, and instead of fighting in Kashmir, they are returning to their home countries where they have been implicated in domestic terror plots", Bell reveals in his reports.
According to the Canadian publication, in Britain, the United States, Australia and Canada, counter-terrorism investigators have been increasingly turning up links between local extremist cells and Lashkar-e-Toiba. It says that the Canadian Lashkar cell engages in recruitment, terror-financing, the acquisition of material and worse. And Bell claims that compound in Muridke covers 80 hectares and forms a "mini-state" that 'sprawls over the arid Punjab plain -- the headquarters of what has been called the largest jihadi organization in Pakistan. "A barricade and a Kalashnikov-toting sentry ... block the dirt road ... that leads to the village of Nandal Saadhan where this camp in located", he adds.
The article says that before 9/11 Lashkar enjoyed wide popular support in Pakistan. It was also covertly backed by the Pakistani government, which used it as a proxy force against India in Kashmir. "Now there are indications that Lashkar is evolving into a global exporter of terror", Bell wrote, adding that while the organisation was once focused only on the Kashmir conflict, it has opened its camps to foreigners in the past two years.
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