By Staff Reporter
MUZAFFARABAD: Police in Azad Jammu and Kashmir arrested at least 72 members of a freshly banned protest movement in a sweep conducted over roughly 18 hours, authorities said on Saturday, alleging that some detainees were found carrying weapons, communication devices and documents suggesting coordination with foreign individuals.
The detained men are affiliated with the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, known as JAAC, which the AJK government placed on the First Schedule of its Anti-Terrorism Act just one day earlier. A spokesperson for the Inspector General of Police said operations were conducted “in accordance with the law” and that investigations into the seized material were ongoing.
The allegations, if substantiated, would mark a serious deepening of what began as a domestically rooted protest movement. JAAC rose to prominence in recent years through mass campaigns against electricity costs, wheat prices and government privileges — grievances that resonated broadly across the mountainous, semi-autonomous territory. Authorities now contend that at least some within the organization’s ranks had graduated from street agitation to contact with unnamed parties abroad, though no specific details were provided.
Police said preliminary findings indicated that some of those arrested had been planning to disrupt public order, interfere with the upcoming legislative elections, damage public and private property and incite hostility against state institutions.
The arrests came days before a major JAAC-organized protest march scheduled for June 9, and as the group has called for a region-wide shutter-down and wheel-jam strike. JAAC had also reported this week that one protester was killed and a senior member wounded in Rawalakot, the main city of Poonch district, during recent unrest — an account authorities have neither confirmed nor disputed publicly.
AJK Prime Minister Faisal Mumtaz Rathore, separately addressing the media on Saturday, said his government would no longer engage with the group. Without naming individuals, he alleged that those behind the unrest were supporters of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. He added that JAAC leaders had publicly stated they would not stand down from what he characterized as attacks on the state — a posture he said left no room for negotiation.
The territory is weeks from legislative elections, lending particular urgency — and sensitivity — to the government’s moves against a group that, whatever its methods, commands genuine popular sympathy over economic grievances that have gone largely unaddressed for years.
Meanwhile, the opposition Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf party of former prime minister Imran Khan expressed alarm at the AJK government’s decision to designate the popular civil society movement that has led protests over taxation and utility costs — as a proscribed organization.
“If JAAC was truly a terrorist organization, why did the government spend months negotiating with it, signing agreements with it, implementing its demands, holding meetings with its leadership and treating it as a legitimate stakeholder?” the party asked in a statement. The PTI said the move followed the same playbook used against itself: suppression of peaceful protest, roadblocks, communication blackouts, and the conversion of democratic demands into security threats.
PTI called on the international community, human rights organizations, and what it described as “all democratic forces” to take notice of what it called a “blatant murder of democracy” in AJK.
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