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| HUJI chief still at large |
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Tuesday, September 23, 2008
By Amir Mir
LAHORE: Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the Harkatul Jehadul Islami (HUJI) chief, suspected of involvement in the Marriott Hotel suicide bombing, is still at large.
Benazir Bhutto had alleged in her posthumous book that Qari Saifullah, who had played a lead role in a 1995 failed coup plot to topple her second government, had masterminded the October 18, 2007 deadly suicide attack on her welcome procession in Karachi
Shortly before her assassination, Benazir Bhutto was putting final touches to her hard-hitting memoirs: “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West”, which were published by Simon & Schuster six weeks after her death.
In this book she made some shocking allegations, stating: “It was Qari to whom the intelligence officials in Lahore had turned for help before my homecoming on October 18, 2007”. Although no one is sure if there was a link between the release of Qari and the murder of Bhutto, the PPP circles ask as to why an al-Qaeda linked dreaded terrorist having known links with the Taliban militia was set free by the Musharraf regime after three years, before Bhutto’s homecoming
Benazir Bhutto writes in her book: “I was informed of a meeting that had taken place in Lahore where the bomb blasts were planned. However, a bomb maker was needed for the bombs. Enter Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a wanted jehadi terrorist who had tried to overthrow my second government in the 1990s. He had been extradited by the United Arab Emirates and was languishing in the Karachi central jail. According to my sources, the officials in Lahore had turned to Qari for help. His liaison with elements in the government was a radical who was asked to make the bombs and he himself asked for a fatwa making it legitimate to oblige. He got one,” she added
On February 26, 2008, exactly two weeks after Benazir Bhutto’s book was published and the subsequent pressure created by the international community, the Musharraf administration arrested Qari Saifullah for interrogation. He was subsequently released on bail from a Karachi jail three months later, in June 2008
Born in 1958 in Waziristan, Qari Saifullah is a graduate of the Jamia Binoria, Karachi, a well-known religious seminary of the sub-continent which has produced several prominent pro-Taliban Deobandi kingpins like the Harkatul Mujahideen chief Fazlur Rehman Khalil and the Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar. Qari Saifullah had been arrested and extradited from the United Arab Emirates on August 7, 2004 on charges of plotting the twin suicide attacks on General Musharraf in Rawalpindi in December 2003. However, instead of trying to prosecute and convict him after his arrest, the agencies chose to keep him under detention for the next two years and nine months, without even filing any criminal charges against him in any court of law
His arrest was challenged in the Supreme Court of Pakistan in the first week of January 2005. On January 18, 2005 the Supreme Court dismissed the petition against Qari’s arrest and directed the petitioner to first move the High Court by filing a habeas corpus writ petition. A Supreme Court bench of Justice Hamid Ali Mirza and Justice Falak Sher ruled that his arrest was not a matter of public importance and hence a constitutional petition could not be filed directly in the Supreme Court. However, after Bhutto’s murder, it emerged that Qari Saifullah had quietly been released by the agencies as one of the missing persons being sought by a Supreme Court bench under the now deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry
Before that, on May 5, 2007, the federal government told the Supreme Court that Qari Saifullah was not in the custody of the state agencies.
The report presented by the National Crisis Management Cell to the Court, said, “He is engaged in jehadi activities somewhere in Punjab,” thus denying that he was under detention. Two weeks later, on May 21, 2007, Qari Saifullah suddenly reached his home in Mandi Bahauddin.
The release was subsequently brought to the notice of the apex court on May 26, 2007, by the Ministry of Interior. Hashmat Habib, Qari Saifullah’s counsel, having confirmed the release of his client, told the Court that while setting him free, the intelligence officials told Qari that had they not picked him up, there was a strong possibility of the American FBI taking him away for interrogation because of his alleged al-Qaeda and Taliban links
Hashmat’s statement only supplemented Bhutto’s claim that Qari Saifullah was involved with those who were plotting to assassinate her upon her homecoming. Even otherwise, at the time of his August 2004 dramatic arrest and subsequent extradition from the UAE, Pakistani authorities had described the development as a major blow to the al-Qaeda sponsored terrorist network and its local affiliates in the country.
The then information minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed painted him as a close aide of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the latter being the operational head of al-Qaeda in Pakistan
Though Saifullah’s role in the October 18, 2008 Karachi suicide attack could not be explored for one reason or the other, his previous involvement in a failed coup plot of 1995 had projected him as one of the most deadly militants who, from the intelligence establishment’s viewpoint, had gone astray.
The group of the potential coup makers busted by the Military Intelligence at that time included four serving Army officers, including a major-general, who were accused of plotting to first takeover the GHQ in Rawalpindi during the Corps Commanders Conference and later overthrow the Benazir government to eventually enforce their own brand of Islamic Shariah in Pakistan. Qari was among the five top members of the group headed by Major General Zahirul Islam Abbasi, with Brigadier Mustansir Billa who was described as the ideologue of the group
After their arrest, these Army officers were formally charged by the field court martial with conspiring to assassinate military commanders. Qari Saifullah was to provide them with military uniforms, arms and ammunition needed for the covert operation. However, once the court martial started, Qari’s name was dropped from the list of accused as he turned approver against his khaki co-conspirators.
Those conducting the court martial proceedings had admitted at one stage that without the testimony of Qari Saifullah, it would have been extremely difficult to convict the khaki accused. However, after the dismissal of the second Bhutto government in November 1996, Qari was released; he went to Afghanistan and was inducted into the cabinet of Taliban Ameer Mullah Mohammad Omar as his adviser on political affairs
Once in Afghanistan, the militants of Qari’s HUJI were called ‘Punjabi’ Taliban and offered employment, something that other jehadi organisations could not get out of Mullah Omar. Interestingly, the HUJI had membership among the Taliban too as three Taliban ministers and 22 judges belonged to it. The Harkat militants stood together with Mullah Omar in difficult times under the command of Qari Saifullah.
At one stage, at least 300 HUJI militants lost their lives while fighting the Northern Alliance troops, prompting Mullah Mohammad Omar to let HUJI build six more training camps in Kandahar, Kabul and Khost, where the Taliban army also used to receive military training. But the distance of Qari Saifullah Akhtar from the organisation’s Pakistani operation did not lead to any rift.
In fact, Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami emerged from the defeat of the Taliban largely intact. Before the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, the HUJI had branch offices in 40 districts across Pakistan
Interestingly, Qari Saifullah was one of the few jehadi leaders who had escaped with Mullah Omar after the US-led Allied Forces invaded Afghanistan in October 2001. He first took shelter in the South Waziristan Agency; then moved to Peshawar and eventually fled to Saudi Arabia, from where he decided to move to the UAE
Three years later, on August 6, 2004, he was arrested by the UAE authorities and handed over to the Pakistani agencies, only to be deported. He was arrested after revelations during investigations into the December 2003 twin suicide attacks on Pervez Musharraf that he had been executing terrorist operations in Pakistan with the help of his right hand man, Amjad Hussain Farooqi.
The whereabouts of Qari are unknown as he is believed to have gone underground in the aftermath of the September 20 Marriott Hotel suicide bombing.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
