Balochistan government spokesperson Anwarul Haq Kakar on Monday said that the provincial home minister's comments about Afghan Taliban studying in seminaries across the province to the Voice of America (VOA) radio were quoted out of context.

Sarfaraz Bugti, Balo­chis­tan's minister for home and tribal affairs, had earlier told VOA's Deewa Afghan service, "There are many seminaries where Afghan Taliban are studying, and many are owned by the Afghan Taliban group."

Know more: Thousands of Afghan Taliban studying in Balochistan: provincial minister

The report claimed that Pakistan had more than 30,000 madressahs, most of them legal, and adhering strictly to religious teaching. But thousands of them were not registered with the government and these were the “teaching grounds and recruiting points for militants and Taliban”.

Kakar told Dawn.com that Bugti had actually been referring to Afghans living in the province.

He said that the Balochistan government has successfully registered around 70 per cent of religious seminaries operating across the province under the National Action Plan (NAP), adding that teachers and students studying in around 6,000 madressahs in the province had also been profiled.

The provincial government has already formed a committee comprising top officials, including secretaries of various departments such as home, education, social welfare and industries to ensure all seminaries in the province are registered.

"We want to bring madressahs in the mainstream", the spokesperson said.

Kakar also rubbished allegations put forth by the Afghan Ministry of Interior to VOA, where Sediq Seddiqi, the government's spokesperson, had claimed that last month's terrorist attack in Kandahar which killed five United Arab Emirates diplomats was planned in Mawlawi Ahmad Madressah in Chaman.

Kakar claimed that the Afghan government has little to no presence in "70 per cent" of its own territory, so how could it claim the attack was planned on Pakistani soil.

"Afghans have been trying to make Pakistan a scapegoat for their weaknesses," he said. Kakar alleged that most of Afghanistan is under the control of Taliban.

"Therefore, it is crystal clear that the planning for the suicide attack was done in Afghanistan," he alleged.

He reiterated that border management at the porous Pak-Afghan border needs to improve.

"We want to fence and manage the border to stop illegal movement," he asserted.

In its report, the VOA said that it collected these statistics from Pakistani and Afghan intelligence officials and experts who told its correspondents that the abundance of unregistered madressahs across the country had led to an increase in militancy in the Afghan-Pakistan region.

"The schools nurture militants’ ideology and provide foot soldiers for the Taliban, who have been engaged in a bloody insurgency with the US-backed Afghan government for more than a decade," the report claimed.

According to the report, much of the militant activity was centred in Balochistan, where it said 5,500 madressahs operate as boarding schools.

"Many of them are kept from government scrutiny and are breeding points for terror," the report had claimed.