Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Former president Asif Ali Zardari has expressed concern over the allocation of Rs 300 million public funds to a Islamic seminary in Nowshera, a district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

“This is nothing but legitimisation of militancy and militants that will undermine the nation’s resolve to fight them to the finish,” he said in a statement issued by the PPP Secretariat here on Sunday.

“The former president is deeply concerned over the use of public funds for legitimising a private seminary,” said Senator Farhatullah Babar, the spokesperson for the party. He said that the resources should have been spent on human development instead of on a seminary whose claim to fame lies in its promotion of militancy.

Senator Babar said that it must have happened around the time when a group of the militant reportedly claimed responsibility for the target killing of Qawwal Amjad Sabri in Karachi makes it all the more poignant.

During the government-Taliban talks in 2014, the militant militia actually named the head of the seminary to negotiate on their behalf, Zardari said. “The head of the Darul Uloom Haqqania in Nowshera is an acknowledged sympathiser and undeclared spokesperson of the Taliban,” he said.

“It is also widely known that a number of militant leaders have been students of this seminary,” he added. Zardari said that in the wake of killing of Mullah Mansoor Akhtar in Balochistan recently, it appeared that some elements were reviving the militant project.

Explaining this, he said that recently conservative religious parties led by a proscribed organisation held congregations in Islamabad protesting Mansoor’s death. “Now a privately-owned pro-Taliban madrassah (seminary) has been given Rs 300 million.”