Neighbours surprised by action against Jamaat-ud-Daawa

[Naveed Yaseen]

The doors of the office of Jamaat-ud-Daawa (JUD) in Gulshan-e-Iqbal have been sealed with many wondering the fate of the organization in the coming days. A visit to the offices at Salman Terrace in Gulshan-e-Iqbal shows that the offices have been effectively closed for the time being with many neighbours complaining that they did not suspect that such an organization operated in their midst.

People in the neighborhood of the sealed office of Jamaat-ud-Daawa Trust in Gulshan-e-Iqbal believe that the workers of banned organization were polite and they never indulged in any sort of conflict with them. The police had sealed the Jamaat-ud-Daawa office after imposition of nationwide ban on the organization last week. The sealed office of the trust was located at the fourth and the last floor of a residential apartment block called Salman Terrace in Gulshan-e-Iqbal.

The locks of two adjacent doors of the office were properly sealed on the behalf of the Sind Government when The News visited the offices. There is no other way through which anyone could go into office apart from the sealed gates therefore observers said that it is safe to assume that this office has effectively been shut down.

The five-roomed apartment was being used by the trust as its office. One room of the apartment was being used as a prayer room. A member of the family residing in the apartment situated just opposite the sealed office told The News that her family never thought for once that the workers were in any way different. “Even we learnt a after the sealing of the office that they belonged to Jamaat-ud-Daawa which is allegedly involved in wrong work,” she said.

Rizwan, an employee of Grand Carpets, a shop which situated at the ground floor of the building informed The News that all the workers of the Trust were extremely polite with the people around them. “They use to greet us on their arrival and we never felt any sort of threat or harassment from them,” he commented.

He said he was serving at the shop for the last six years and the office of the Trust was established years before his joining as employee at the carpet shop. The chowkidar of the building, Shakeel, said that the Trust workers were extremely peaceful. “They would park their motorbikes inside the building and they never behaved with me or with some other person harshly,” he commented.

Some other residents when contacted showed their ignorance about any arrest of the workers during the sealing operation of the office. They said around 10 workers used to visit the office daily. A few persons on the condition of anonymity told this scribe that they observed some mysterious wall chalking in the locality some days before the Trust was banned.

While many claimed that the workers of the Jamaat-ud-Daawa looked peaceful, others said that the action against the Trust had been taken at a time when tensions in the city are already on the rise. It may be mentioned that Daawa did participate in the collection of hides a few days before the government took action against it.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=151910