LAHORE, June 24: The Punjab police rounded up over 100 activists of the banned jehadi organisations in various parts of the province in a crackdown launched late on Sunday night.

Sources told Dawn the arrests were made in a joint operation carried out by the Punjab and Sindh police. The personnel of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are said to have supervised the crackdown, they said.

A senior Punjab police officer, however, denied the FBI’s involvement or supervision, saying: “There is nothing like that.” “We acted upon our own information and took into custody some dozen people belonging to the banned jehadi organisations,” he said. Case registration against them is in the process, he added, without going into details of the charges to be levelled against the arrested men.

A student who picked up phone at Masjid Bilal, considered to be a stronghold of the SSP in Lahore, said at least eight people were picked up in the raid on the mosque early Monday morning. Those conducting the raid were personnel from different law enforcement agencies, he said and alleged: “The law enforcers desecrated the mosque by entering there with their shoes on and they also thrashed people present there without differentiating between the activists and the worshippers.”

The sources said some 52 men, a majority of them belonging to the banned Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ) and Sipah-i-Sehaba Pakistan (SSP) were arrested in at least 64 raids in Lahore alone. Of them, 32 were taken into custody from City division police, nine from Cantonment, seven from Sadar division police and four from Model Town division. The rest were rounded up in other parts of the Punjab.

In Lahore, the Elite police patrols were seen running on the city roads from late on Sunday night to early Monday morning. Men belonging to different banned jehadi organisations were literally found running helter-skelter, with the raiding teams chasing them.

The raids were conducted on seminaries, mosques, offices and residences of the activists and leaders of the banned jehadi groups. The police teams were seen carrying ladders on police vans which they used to climb over the walls of the places they raided on.

The sources said the raids were conducted on information gathered from some LJ men, chiefly Akram Lahori, considered to be one of its main leaders after the killing of Riaz Basra, arrested in Karachi last week after the car blast outside the US consulate in Karachi.

The men arrested in Karachi had reportedly told the investigators about the links between the banned jihadi organisations and Al-Qaeda. The main objective of the crackdown was to track down the links and different kind of support believed to have been provided by the banned jehadi organisations to the Al-Qaeda in their operations to target the US and Pakistan’s interest in the country.

Meanwhile, the men taken into custody in the crackdown were shifted to unknown places for interrogation. No significant leader of the banned jehadi organisations is among the arrested men.

Furthermore, the sources said, senior Punjab police hierarchy and heads of some other law enforcement agencies were briefing the army command about the operation at the Corps headquarters in Lahore till the filing of this report at 7pm.

No case has so far been registered against the arrested men.