Reporter Stewart Bell, an expert on security issues, detailed his recent visit to Pakistan where he went to Meridke, Lashkar-e-Tayiba's training camp near Lahore and found out from local people how Pakistani jihadis are trained and sent out to engage in terrorist activities in several countries.
Bell wrote that at least five of 18 people, most of them Pakistani-Canadians, who were arrested in Toronto on June 2 and charged with conspiring to commit terrorist acts in Canada, had been trained at a Lashkar camp.
"Over the last two years... some of these (Lashkar) recruits have been Westerners, and instead of fighting in Kashmir, they are returning to their home countries where they have been implicated in domestic terror plots,' Bell reveals in his reports.
Bell is the author of Cold Terror: How Canada Nurtures and Exports Terrorism Round the World (2004).
'In Britain, the United States, Australia and Canada, counter-terrorism investigators have been increasingly turning up links between local extremist cells and Lashkar-e-Tayiba,' he wrote, adding that the Canadian Lashkar cell 'engages in recruitment, terror-financing, the acquisition of material and worse.'
In his reports Bell claims compound in Meridke covers 80 hectares and forms a 'mini-state' that 'sprawls over the arid Punjab plain -- the headquarters of what has been called the largest jihadi organization in Pakistan.' 'A barricade and a Kalashnikov-toting sentry ... block the dirt road ... that leads to the village of Nandal Saadhan' where this camp in located,' he wrote.
Bell says as he tried to go closer to the camp, he was chased away. 'What goes on inside the Meridke compound and others like it is of growing concern to Western governments' and certainly to India because for years it has been the training ground for Lashkar-managed terrorist acts in Kashmir.
He wrote in his series of articles of the close links between Lashkar-e-Tayiba and another suspiciously similar group, the Jamaat-ud Dawa. But Abdur Rahman Makki, one of the senior leaders of Jamaat-ud Dawa, is quoted as saying that claims that their organisation was engaged in terrorism was 'only Indian propaganda.' He said the group only promoted 'the purification of the society, and to build a society on the basis of the Koran and Sunnah,' he said.
Another Jamaat leader Abdullah Muntazer was quoted as describing that period: 'At that time we were close to the Lashkar-e-Tayiba and you could say that Lashkar and Jamaat-ud Dawa were the same.' After 9/11, both the US and Pakistan banned Lashkar. To evade the consequences of being banned, some experts say Lashkar chief Hafeez Mohammed Saeed simply changed the name of his organisation from Lashkar to Jamaat-ud Dawa.
The article says that before 9/11 Lashkar 'enjoyed wide popular support in Pakistan. It was also covertly backed by the Pakistani government, which used it as a proxy force against India in Kashmir. Now there are indications that Lashkar is evolving into a global exporter of terror,' Bell wrote, adding that while the organisation was once focused only on the Kashmir conflict, it has opened its camps to foreigners in the past two years."
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