Pak FM criticises minister who shared stage with Saeed
Pakistan’s religious affairs minister Noor-ul-Haq Qadri “should have been more sensitive” while sharing a stage with Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed, foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has said.
Qadri, a member of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, triggered a storm by joining Saeed at an event in Islamabad on Sunday that focused on the Kashmir issue. Several pro-Jamaat-ud-Dawah social media accounts cited Qadri as saying that he was at the event on Khan’s instructions.
The minister was seen seated close to Saeed as he addressed an all party conference organised by the Difa-e-Pakistan Council, a coalition of more than 40 extremist and religious groups.
“I think he (Qadri) should have been more sensitive, but it wasn’t that he subscribes to his (Saeed’s) point of view,” Qureshi said at an event organised in Washington on Wednesday by the think tank US Institute of Peace.
He was responding to a question from the audience why Qadri appeared side by side at a public conference with a person linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terror group banned by Pakistan.
“I will go home and certainly
WASHINGTON:
ask him (Qadri) why he did that. But what I am told it was an event to highlight the situation in Kashmir. It had nothing to do with Lashkar-e-Taiba,” Qureshi said.
“There were other political elements there. He (Qadri) happened to be one of them,” he added. The US has designated Saeed a specially designated global terrorist and offered a $10 million bounty for information that brings him to justice. Saeed now heads the JuD, declared a front for the LeT by the US.
Qureshi said Pakistan is serious about fighting terror. “We cannot surrender to terrorism. We will have to take them on. We have successfully done that. It’s a work in progress, we would have to continue to build on what you’ve achieved, but to a large extent, things have changed.”