Charges against hardline Islamist group in Pak

Pakistan’s government on Saturday announced it will press terrorism and sedition charges against leaders of a hardline Islamist group that staged recent protests across the country.

The leader of the Tehreek-eLabbaik (TLP) party, Khadim Hussain Rizvi, and several senior figures were detained last month after they shut down major cities in protest at the acquittal of a Christian woman who had spent eight years on death row on blasphemy charges. One of the TLP co-founders called for the killing of the Supreme Court judges who acquitted Asia Bibi, as well as the overthrow of the government and the powerful army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa.

Pakistani Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said Rizvi had been “charged under sections of sedition and terrorism” in a police station in the eastern city of Lahore. Three other senior TLP figures are facing the same charges.

“Today we have decided to take legal action against the TLP leadership,” Chaudhry told a press conference.

“All those who were directly involved in destroying property, who misbehaved with women, who set fire to buses, are being charged under laws of terrorism at different police stations.”

The move represents a hardening of the authorities’ stance towards the group, which in late 2017 paralysed the capital Islamabad for sev- eral weeks and clashed with the police in deadly protests.

In 2017 and last month TLP members called off protests after negotiating with the military and reaching a deal with the government, which made many concessions to appease the group. When Rizvi was finally detained, authorities said he was not arrested, but merely put in “protective custody”.

Chaudhry said more than 3,000 TLP members were taken into protective custody in the wake of the protests.

The TLP, whose main focus is protecting Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws, was founded out of a movement supporting a bodyguard who assassinated Punjab provincial governor Salman Taseer for advocating for Bibi in 2011. Somalia’s South West state will delay a key presidential vote for the third time because it is not sufficiently prepared, the semi-autonomous region’s election committee said on Saturday.

Tensions between the federal government and state authorities have mounted in recent weeks after Mogadishu tried to block the candidacy of former al Shabaab Islamist militant Mukhtar Robow. “After the committee evaluated the many activities awaiting, available time and the incomplete tasks to be completed within a short time frame..., (it) decided the election date will be 19 December,” a committee statement said. The original date for the election was Nov. 17 before its initial postponement to 28 November and then to 5 December.

South West is slated to be the first of Somalia’s seven semiautonomous regions to hold presidential elections in the coming months, a critical juncture in a growing power struggle between the central government in Mogadishu and the states. The postponement in South West state came a day after the central government deployed dozens of federal police officers to Baidoa, the state capital, to help “tighten security”, said Hassan Hussein, South West state security minister. Further deployments would be made to help prevent al Shabaab destabilising the election, Hussein told reporters on Friday. “There is an election and what is required is an election to take place peacefully. The enemy al Shabaab often tries to terrify the peace of South West state,” Hussein said.

Somalia has been trying to claw its way out of the remnants of the civil war that engulfed it in 1991, when clan warlords overthrew a dictator and then turned on each other. Al Shabaab has been fighting for more than a decade to topple the weak central government and implement its interpretation of Islamic law.