Despite an official ban on the collection of sacrificial hides by jihadi outfits â banned as well as those put on the watch list â the groups have managed to collect hides by changing their tactic. Hide collection has been a major source of revenue for various parties and groups in the past and only in Karachi the leather industry purchases hides worth millions of rupees during and after the three days of Eid-ul Adha. This year was no different, only the bulk of these hides was collected and sold this year by seminaries and Islamic charities. This time round the groups did not advertise their hide collection drive and instead stayed in the background. Most of the work was done by students from various seminaries, many of whom are ideologically affiliated with one or the other group. The majority of the seminaries are Deobandi, as are the jihadi groups.
A police officer TFT spoke with confirmed this finding. According to him, thousands of Karachi seminaries, majority of whom belong to the Deobandi/Salafi schools, mobilised their students to collect hides. These students were supervised in the field by activists of the banned outfits who moved about in the city posing as officials from the seminaries. The groups that made the biggest collections included the banned Jamiat al-Furqan and Khuddam ul Islam and the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which the government has put on the watch list since last November. Investigators say it is difficult to estimate how much money the groups must have made through hide collection but it is safe to guess that countrywide this must run into a few billion.
Not a bad racquet
Reports published last year suggested al-Dawa alone had raised some Rs 710 million by collecting 1.2 million hides of animals sacrificed on Eid across the country. Sources said 40 per cent of the total hides of the animals sacrificed on Eid had gone to the collection centres of al-Dawa. At the time it was easier to estimate the money made since these figures were put on the al-Dawa website. This year the group remains quiet on its hide collection activity. However, an al-Dawa spokesman based in Lahore told TFT the peopleâs response was âbeyond expectationsâ. âWe have collected more hides than we had collected last year,â Abu Mujahid Nadeem of al-Dawa says. |