LAHORE A division bench of the Lahore High Court (LHC) Wednesday sought a reply from the government until April 20 on an application seeking release of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, his aides Prof Malik Zafar Iqbal, Abdur Rehman Abid, Qazi Kashif Hussain and Abdullah Ubaid and others.
The application was filed in the already pending petition seeking directives for the government to release them.
Counsel for petitioners A K Dogar said that it was clearly cited in the main petition that his clients’ detention was unlawful and the government had no ground to detain them. He said that if ultimately their detention was proved unconstitutional they would face irreparable loss.
He requested the court to order government to release them.
On January 31st, the Punjab government placed Hafiz Saeed and four other party leaders under house arrest after the Interior Ministry issued a letter. This letter was issued to the provincial government on January 29, stating that as per the UN Security Council sanctions, two organisations namely the JuD and the Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FIF), a public welfare arm of the JuD, have been put on the watch list and listed in the second schedule of the Anti-Terrorism Act.
The Interior Ministry, on January 27, intimated that the JuD and the FIF were allegedly engaged in activities that could be prejudicial to peace and security, and were in violation of Pakistan’s obligations to the UN Security Council Resolution 1267.
A number of the JuD and FIF pamphlets had also been made part of the petition, which highlighted the organisations’ volunteer work in different parts of the country, according to the notification putting them under detention.
Hafiz Saeed and others had challenged their detention ordered by the provincial government.
