Rise & Fall Of Hafiz Saeed – Burning Issues

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Who is Hafiz Saeed?

Hafiz Muhammad Saeed is a Pakistani Islamic terrorist who is a co-founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the chief of Jama’at-ud-Da’wah (JuD), operating mainly from Pakistan.
Hafiz Saeed is listed on the NIA Most Wanted list and UN designated terrorist.
India has banned his organisations LeT and JuD as terrorist organisations.
US has a bounty of $10m on his capture.

Hafiz Muhammad Saeed was born in a family of Sargodha, Punjab in Pakistan. His family had migrated from East Punjab and reached Pakistan after Partition.
A major early influence on his life and ideology was his maternal uncle Hafiz Abdullah Bahawalpuri who held that democracy was incompatible with Islam.

Saeed graduated from university of Sargodha.
After graduation in 1974, Hafiz Saeed was appointed lecturer at the University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Lahore in the Islamiat department.
Later he went for higher studies to Saudi Arabia and became intimate with the infamous Saudi scholar, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz.
- Note: Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz issues fatwa of jihad in Afganistan in 1979
- Saeed joined the training camp of Abdur Rasul Sayyaf in Afghanistan, where he linked up with the teacher of Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Azzam. He met Bin laden several times.
In 1990, he helped setup Lashkar-e-Taiba with assistance of ISI.

LeT under Saeed became a well-known jihadi outfit in the region, boasting of 1,100 martyrs and fight for Kashmir by 2001.
In 2003 the LeT was banned. It then became Jamaat-ud-Dawa and devoted itself to serving al Qaeda as a coordinating agency with networks in Pakistan.
- 2003: Bin Laden’s ally, Abu Zubaydah, was caught in Faisalabad from a safe house of Hafiz Saeed.

2001: Parliament attack
2006: Train bombings in Mumbai
2008: Mumbai attacks
- Note:
  - US had arrested Saeed in 2001, but released later. Pakistan had termed this illegal detention.
  - 2009: Pakistan placed Saeed under house arrest but all charges were later quashed.

Saeed’s Jamaat-ud-dawah has been active in Pakistan for years now.
It is said that Saeed’s LeT & JUD run stealth courts all over Pakistan based on Sharia law.
In fact, in 2018, during the time of the Pakistan national elections, Saeed had entered the political arena, floating a political party named ‘Milli Muslim League’.