People walk to the Jamaat-ud-Dawa mosque in Lahore to offer Friday prayers. (AP)

Lahore, Dec. 13: On a normal Friday afternoon, the line of cars and red Honda motorbikes outside the Qadssiya mosque stretches to a gas station a half mile away. Nearly 8,000 worshippers typically come to hear Hafiz Mohammad Saeed preach at the headquarters of the organisation he leads, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity that fronts for the Lashkar-e-Toiba.

The two-tiered mosque can accommodate only a portion of the crowd, so the remainder spills out onto a broad concrete courtyard.

But this Friday, the road outside was clear, and the few thousand who showed up could all fit inside. The day before, the Pakistani authorities had put Saeed under house arrest and closed dozens of the group’s offices. Many followers were unnerved.

“The government has created a panic,” said Mohammed Nawaz, 35, one of the mosque administrators, who estimated that only one in four persons came to this week’s services. “Our leader has been arrested, so what happens if they come to prayers? Not a lot of people have come today. People are not certain what will happen next.”

A few miles away, in Saeed’s leafy neighbourhood, it was a decidedly more relaxed scene. Several dozen policemen ringed the area around his home, standing casually with rifles and enforcing a house arrest that seemed more of a forced vacation.

Two heavily bearded workers from the Jamaat-ud-Dawa arrived with food, and the police raised the barricades and allowed them through, choosing not to inspect their Suzuki truck. Saeed’s relatives have been allowed to come and go freely, policemen said. A young boy and a girl standing on the second-floor balcony of Saeed’s home looked down at the police and smiled.

One local police commander, seeing media personnel arrive, rushed over and proclaimed that Saeed was confined inside his home, banned from going outside now or at any other time.

Almost on cue, Saeed emerged moments later from the mosque across the street, clad in a green jacket and a cream-coloured salwar kameez, and ambled back to his house. “No, no, it’s not Hafiz Saeed,” the embarrassed commander said, though it clearly was. “I’m just following instructions.”

The two scenes underscored the Pakistani government’s deeply mixed reaction to Saeed and his organisation following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that the Indian and US governments have accused the Lashkar of carrying out.

Under intense pressure to show some resolve against homegrown terrorism, the Pakistani government claims to have arrested the Lashkar official suspected of running the Mumbai attacks, and then on Thursday and Friday it shut down dozens of Dawa offices and said it had detained many of the group’s members.

But the government has also taken clear steps to soften the blow, like allowing Saeed to hold a defiant news conference before his house arrest began. Saeed maintains that neither he nor the Dawa has had connections to the Lashkar for more than six years.

As was apparent at his home yesterday, the government is clearly reluctant to cut off Saeed and his group too abruptly, partly out of expediency but partly out of fear, too.

The Lashkar and the Dawa remain popular in Punjab, the most populous province, where the cities and villages that spread out from Lahore, the provincial capital, have been the principal recruiting ground for the outfits and for the men accused of carrying out the Mumbai attacks.

Inside the mosque, Saeed’s 38-year-old son, Mohammed Talha Saeed, took his father’s place at the podium and inveighed against the government’s crackdown as the result of “dictation from the United States” and pressure from “Jews and the Hindu lobby”.

“If the government continues this type of activity, then one day the army of God will come,” he lectured, urging worshippers to remain patient.