KARACHI, 22 September 2003 — Pakistan was yesterday questioning 13 Malaysian and two Indonesian students suspected of links to the Jemaah Islamiah (JI) regional terror network, an intelligence officer said.
The 15 students were arrested Saturday at the request of their respective countries in predawn raids on three religious schools and some hostels in Karachi — the port city of 14 million where hundreds of Al-Qaeda operatives have hidden — after several weeks of surveillance, the officer said.
The students were suspected of activities “not in Pakistan’s national interest,” he said, declining to elaborate.
“There is a possibility that some of them have links with Jemaah Islamiah,” he told AFP on condition of anonymity.
JI, with links to Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, is blamed for a string of attacks in Indonesia including Christmas Eve church bombings that killed 19 people in 2000, the Bali blasts last October that killed 202 people and a car bombing on Aug. 5 at the JW Marriot hotel in Jakarta that left 12 dead. The Interior Ministry’s National Crisis Management Cell director, Brig. Javed Cheema, said the students were involved “in undesirable activities prejudicial to the interest of Pakistan,” and would all be deported.
Several members of the Southeast Asian network are reported to have undergone military training at former Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and spent time in Pakistani religious schools.
The 15 were picked up from the Abu Bakar, Ashraful and Darul Islam madrassas and private hostels in eastern Karachi’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal district and taken to a secret location in Karachi for interrogation by Pakistani intelligence agents, the intelligence officer said. US Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) agents may be invited to join the questioning.
“The request for their arrest came from their respective countries, who have sought their deportation. They may be in a better position to confirm links of some of them with Jemaah Islamiah,” he said.
A report from Jakarta, however, said Indonesia’s envoy in Islamabad had not been notified of the arrests nor the detained Indonesians’ location and has protested to the Pakistani government. None of the detainees admitted to links with extremist groups, the intelligence officer said.
“They only admitted they had overstayed their visas, but said they were just students studying Islam,” he said.
Indonesia’s acting consul general in Karachi identified the Indonesian detainees as Gungun Rusman Gunawan, 27, and Saifuddin, both students at the Abu Bakar school who hailed from Indonesia’s main Java island. Saifuddin was a new student.
Many of Pakistan’s 10,000 religious schools are considered breeding grounds for extremism. Thousands of their students joined the hard-line Taleban militia, which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
Under efforts to regulate the schools since last year, Pakistan has been cracking down on foreign students who overstay their visas and has banned foreign funding.
