Hafiz Muhammad Saeed (1948-) was the emir of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant group that carried out several terrorist attacks against neighboring India in Jammu and Kashmir and the Muslim north.
Biography[]
Hafiz Muhammad Saeed was born in 1948 in Sargodha, Punjab, Pakistan to an "untouchable" Sunni Muslim family. He was appointed to the Council of Islamic Ideology by General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq and taught Islamic studies at the University of Engineering and Technology, and in the 1980s he met with Saudi sheikhs that fought in the Soviet-Afghan War while he was studying in Saudi Arabia. Saeed decided to devote himself to the Islamist cause, and in 1987 he founded Lashkar-e-Taiba. This militant group was backed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) intelligence agency due to its opposition to India, and he said that there could not be any peace while India was intact. On 21 December 2001, he was arrested in connection to the 2001 Indian Parliament attack, but he was released in 2002. From 9 August to 17 October 2006, he was again arrested, and from 11 December to June 2009, with the Pakistani government releasing him early on every occasion due to their support of his group. His attacks gained notoriety due to their indiscriminate targeting of both civilian and military targets, with the 2008 Mumbai attacks showing the untamed cruelty of the terrorists. Saeed praised Indian Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde's admission that Hindu terrorism existed, however, and he said that the Pakistani government should aspire to be more like the UK Conservative Party, specifically like Prime Minister David Cameron and London mayor Boris Johnson; he also said that the official language of Pakistan should be Punjabi and not Urdu, as only 8% of the population spoke Urdu and Punjabi was the main language. On 30 January 2017, the Pakistani government issued a warrant for his arrest after years of being pressured to do so.