PESHAWAR: Police in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province have advised Maulana Asad Mahmood, a top leader of Pakistan’s prominent Jamiat-e-Ulama-e-Islam (JUI-F) religious party, to avoid unnecessary travel and public gatherings due to security threats as political parties gear up for the general elections scheduled for February 8.

The JUI-F shared the security advisory addressed to Mahmood with the media on Tuesday, saying it was insufficient for the administration to merely issue such notices since it was also their responsibility to ensure a peaceful environment for political parties to conduct their election campaigns.

Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the party chief and Mahmood’s father, said earlier this week the government should consider advancing the election date to aid authorities in ensuring peaceful national polls following a shooting incident targeting his convoy on the Islamabad-Dera Ismail Khan motorway on Sunday.

“The election commission, judiciary and administration are completely responsible for not providing JUI-F with an environment to carry out election campaign,” the party spokesman, Aslam Ghauri, said in a statement while circulating the security advisory.

“We stood against terrorism with full force and should not be cornered,” he continued. “If our leadership or any worker is harmed, the responsibility will lie with the administration, election commission and judiciary.”

The police advisory released on January 1 warned that militant could target Mahmood, who served as a federal minister in the last government, at his residence or while traveling, asking him to keep his movements confidential for security reasons.

The JUI-F shared the information about it just days after the interior ministry said there were serious threats to the JUI-F chief and Awami National Party (ANP) provincial president Aimal Wali Khan.

Last September, a senior JUI-F leader Hafiz Hamdullah got injured in a blast in Balochistan’s Mastung region that also wounded 10 other people traveling with him.

Prior to that, nearly 40 JUI-F workers were killed in a suicide blast targeting a workers’ convention in Bajaur district in July last year.