Pak govt website says Jaish HQ taken over, then presses delete

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s interior ministry on Friday announced that the Punjab government had taken control of a campus in Bahawalpur that is “reportedly the headquarters of Jaesh-emohammad”. But the announcement on the website of the Press Information Department, or PID, was deleted in less than an hour.

This was the first time in years that the campus, about 430 km from Lahore, had been acknowledged to be the headquarters of the JEM, the terror group run by Masood Azhar that had claimed responsibility for bombing a CRPF bus in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama last week that killed 40 soldiers.

Two tweets by PID, Pakistan government’s media arm, which did not link the campus comprising Madressatul Sabir and Jama-e-masjid Subhanallah to the Jaish were not deleted.

Pakistan’s Dawn News later reported that the interior ministry had issued a fresh statement, claiming that the Bahawalpur complex was “purely a madressah and Jamia Masjid (central mosque) where scores of orphans and students from underprivileged families are receiving religious and worldly education”.

There was no fresh explanation why the government had taken over the complex.

The initial statement had underlined that the government had taken control of the complex “in line with the decision of the National Security Committee meeting held yesterday under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Imran Khan.”

It was as a follow-up to this meeting that the government yesterday reinstated the ban on Hafiz Saeed’s Jamaat-ut-dawah (JUD) and Falah-e-insaniat Foundation.

Pakistan had taken over centres and offices of the JUD soon after the 2008 Mumbai attacks in a similar manner.