Pakistan: Foreigners to be kicked out of religious schools

Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf says foreign students will be ordered to leave Islamic religious schools and has said leaders of banned extremist groups will be arrested, in a new anti-terror crackdown.

The president said he believed he was in a stronger position to campaign against religious militants than during a limited crackdown in 2002.

“I’m in a totally different environment,” Musharraf said yesterday.

Musharraf’s government claims to have arrested nearly 600 suspected militants in the past 10 days and plans to strictly monitor madrassas, religious schools where extremists are thought to be active.

Pakistani security forces “busted a terrorist den” based in an Islamic school in a remote north-western tribal region near Afghanistan yesterday, seizing weapons and explosives, the military said.

A shootout during the raid killed one militant and netted three others, army spokesman Maj Gen Shaukat Sultan said.

The exchange of fire took place at the Shoaib madrassa near Miran Shah, the main town in North Waziristan, Sultan said.

Two of the four alleged suicide bombers in the July 7 terrorist attacks in London visited Pakistan last year, and Pakistani investigators have been trying to learn more about their activities during the trip.

Both men were of Pakistani origin, and one reportedly stayed at a madrassa.

Musharraf has strongly condemned the London attacks as well as the recent bombing in Egypt. Nevertheless, some Western officials have criticised him, saying he should have been tougher on extremists after the September 11, 2001, attacks against the US.

But Musharraf told foreign journalists in Rawalpindi he did not have “a free hand” in 2002 because of an unstable economy, the confrontation with India over Kashmir and insufficient international support for his presidency.

“Maybe the boat would have capsized” if the government had pursued domestic militants more aggressively in 2002, he said. “We took action, but there were restraining factors.”

Musharraf, who has made Pakistan a key US ally in the war on terror, outlined plans to detain extremist leaders, prevent the use of mosques for inciting militancy, and require foreigners, including those of dual nationality, to leave madrassas. Under immigration law, many foreign students would then have to leave Pakistan.

“We need to act against the bigwigs of all the extremist organisations,” Musharraf said. “We are not going as fast as I would like to go.”