ISLAMABAD "¢ Karachi-based ethnic Muttahida Qaumi Movement party is included in the list of foreign terrorist organisations, furnished by a US research institute that exclusively works on terrorism.

The National Memorial Institute for Preventing Terrorism (MIPT), funded by the US Homeland Security Department, considers the MQM as a terrorist outfit and brackets it with dozens of other Pakistan-based militant outfits.

The militant outfits the MQM has been bracketed with are Lashkare Jhangvi, Balochistan Liberation Army, Sipahe Sahaba Pakistan, Lashkare Taeeba, Harkatul Mujahideen and others.

Interestingly, all of the organisations displayed in the MIPT list have already been banned by the Pakistani government except the MQM, presently a major component of ruling coalition. It alleges the MQM for its involvement in turf of war in Karachi and thus concludes that this ethnic-cum-political party bears a history of violence. MQM, originally known as Mohajir Qaumi Movement, has no strong religious or political ideology the MIPT says.

The MQM has been ranked in terrorist outfits as nationalist-separatist organisation. The MIPT is considered a comprehensive databank of global terrorist incidents and organisations often used by the US policymakers.

The MITP that is funded by Homeland Security, works in close coordination with a reputed US think-tank, RAND that it gets verified all terrorist incidents to be used by it later on in the Terrorism Knowledge Base (TKB). The charge sheet that the think-tank furnished against the MQM for declaring it a terrorist group includes attack on private citizens, religious leaders and public property in previous years.

The MIPT put the MQM on its list of terrorist organisation after its violent activities in 2001 and since then it has been among the declared terror outfits of this research institute.

The MIPT has not recorded, however, any violence carried out by this "˜terrorist' group since the time it came into power. According to the MIPT report, the MQM has approximately 3,000 members

Although the MIPT has not elaborated whether these outfits were put onto the terrorist lists on the instructions of the US government etc, it has furnished the list of terrorist organisations working in different countries.

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