Jail Time For The Fanatics

By With Reporting by Ghulam Hasnain/Muzaffarabad

When a country succumbs to demands to release a captured terrorist, it cannot know what price it will later pay. In the case of Maulana Masood Azhar, India thinks it knows now. In 1999 Azhar--at the time a leader of the radical militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen--was in an Indian jail on charges of carrying a fake passport, when masked gunmen hijacked an Indian Airlines jet to Afghanistan and demanded that India free him and two comrades. To protect the lives of the 155 passengers, New Delhi acquiesced. And now, India believes, Azhar, 34, as head of Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), is partly responsible for the Dec. 13 attack on its Parliament by five suicidal militants. It was his arrest--and that of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, leader of the other party India blames, Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure)--that New Delhi demanded and won from Pakistan last week.

It wasn't Azhar's first time in a Pakistani cell. The onetime religion teacher has been in and out of detention since he returned to his native land after India released him. Within weeks, he was in Karachi delivering fanatical speeches and exhorting several thousand armed supporters to destroy India and the U.S. Azhar joined hands with a hard-line Sunni sectarian group and broke away from Harkat-ul-Mujahideen to found the even more fanatical Jaish-e-Muhammad. His new group was the first to favor suicide attacks in India. It has been responsible for grenade and car-bomb assaults on civilian targets, and took responsibility for a devastating bomb blast at the state legislature in Indian-administered Kashmir last October.

No less threatening, but more scholarly and sophisticated, is Saeed, 54. The charismatic red-bearded Islamic-studies professor is Lashkar-e-Taiba's main ideologue. Born in 1947 during his family's flight from northern India during Partition, Saeed memorized the Koran as a boy. He fought briefly in the Afghan jihad against the U.S.S.R. and in 1986 founded the Markaz Ad-Da'wah Wal Irshad, a religious education and proselytizing organization. Lashkar spun off two years later, attracting veterans of the Afghan war. It has taken responsibility for many hit-and-run operations in Indian-held Kashmir but says it never targets civilians. Nevertheless, two civilians and one soldier died in its December 2000 attack on Delhi's landmark Red Fort.

Pakistani officials say it's too soon to know whether the two militant leaders will face trial or eventually be released. Either way, it's doubtful that Pakistan--or India--has heard the last of them.

--With reporting by Ghulam Hasnain/Muzaffarabad