Intelligence assessment: Madrassa to be placed under surveillance

Govt urged to force madrassas to give info on students not from the province.

LAHORE: An intelligence agency has urged the provincial government and the police to start round-the-clock surveillance of a madrassa on the outskirts of Lahore as most of its students are from outside the province, The Express Tribune has learnt.

In a secret memo to the Home Department, the intelligence agency urged the government to draw up regulations making it mandatory for all madrassas in the Punjab to provide information about any students from outside the province to the government on a regular basis. The Home Department has forwarded the intelligence report to the capital city police officer.

The report stated that Madrassa Madina Jadeed, located on 25 acres near the Haier Factory at Muhammadabad on Raiwind Road, has 33 foreign students including 30 from Afghanistan and three from Burma; 493 students from outside the Punjab, including 279 from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, 122 from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), 56 from Balochistan, 16 from Sindh, 11 from Azad Kashmir, six from Gilgit-Baltistan and three from Islamabad; and 247 students from the Punjab.

The foundation stone for the madrassa was laid by the late Maulana Sayed Hamid Mian in 1972. It has been registered with the Punjab government and affiliated with the Wafaqul Madaris since 2004. Maulana Fazlur Rehman, chief of his own faction of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam, is the patron-in-chief of the madrassa.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 30^th, 2012.