Peshawar:
A Muslim cleric in northwest Pakistan has been arrested beneath the anti-terrorism act for threatening Malala Yousafzai and instigating persons to attack the Nobel Laureate for her current comments on marriage, the police stated.
Mufti Sardar Ali Haqqani, a cleric in Marwat district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province was arrested on Wednesday following the police raided his residence, Dawn newspaper reported on Thursday, quoting Lakki Marwat District Police Office.
An FIR beneath the Anti-Terrorism Act was registered against him on the complaint of SHO Wasim Sajjad, it stated.
According to the FIR, a video went viral on social media displaying Mufti Sardar instigating persons at a gathering in Peshawar to take the law into their personal hands and attack Malala. He was armed when the incident took spot, the report stated.
“When Malala comes to Pakistan, I will be the first to attempt a suicide attack on her,” the FIR quoted him as saying.
The complaint additional stated that the speech had threatened peace and incited lawlessness, according to the news report.
In an interview to the Vogue magazine in its most up-to-date edition, 23-year-old Yousafzai, an Oxford graduate and a Pakistani activist for girls education who miraculously survived a bullet to the head from the terror group Taliban in October 2012, revealed that she is not sure if she will ever marry.
I nonetheless do not realize why persons have to get married. If you want to have a particular person in your life, why do you have to sign marriage papers, why can not it just be a partnership? she told the magazine.
Yousafzai’s interview with Vogue has been circulating on the mainstream and social media.
Recently, her views on marriage also echoed in the provincial assembly with Opposition Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) lawmaker Sahibzada Sanaullah demanding the government to probe no matter if she seriously made these remarks on marriage remarks as life partnership was not permitted in any religion and if she favoured it, then the stand was condemnable.
The PPP and Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, an alliance of religious-political parties, also urged her family to clarify their position on the problem, the report stated.
In February, a Pakistani Taliban terrorist, who had allegedly shot Yousafzai, had threatened her, saying that next time, “there would be no mistake.”
()