ISLAMABAD, 29 March 2007 — Girl students at an Islamic school in the Pakistani capital kidnapped a brothel owner, sparking an angry standoff yesterday between police and hundreds of stick-wielding fundamentalists. Tensions mounted after police arrested four female teachers yesterday from the Jamia Hafsa religious school near the city’s Lal Masjid in connection with the abduction.

The madrasa’s vice principal, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, called for police to file a case against the abducted woman.

The incident comes amid concerns about the increasing “Talebanization” of Pakistan, especially in its northwestern regions bordering Afghanistan, with extremists seeking to impose their vision of Islamic Shariah law. Ghazi said male students at the mosque had commandeered two police vans, which had come to monitor the protests and were holding the drivers until the teachers were released.

Mosque officials later showed reporters the two policeman, who were being kept by students in a room. Police driver Qamar Abbas and Constable Hamad Raza said they were passing by the mosque when the students seized them. “They have not mistreated us, they have served us tea and allowed us to keep our mobile phones. We are in touch with our officials and we are not facing any problem,” Raza said.

Hundreds of bearded male students waving bamboo sticks shouted slogans and sealed off streets leading to the mosque, an AFP reporter at the scene said. Young men from other madrasas have also gathered inside the mosque.

“These vulgarities (brothels) are destroying society and the decree says that in this situation, jihad is the only way,” he said, without specifying what that would entail. “They (police) have arrested our respected, veiled teachers for a corrupt woman.” Ghazi, a well-known radical, said that on Tuesday night several female students from the madrasa went to the house of the woman, identified as Shamim, after locals said she was running a “vice den.”

The students forcibly took her, her daughter and a daughter-in-law with them to the madrasa, he said. “People in the area welcomed the move,” he said. The female students were keeping her at the mosque, he said.

“She (Shamim) had been quiet until this morning but now she has started raising hue and cry threatening that she would commit suicide if she was not released,” he added. The students had been warning the woman to stop her business for the past few weeks, they said.

Ghazi later said the local administration had agreed to register a case against the woman for allegedly running the prostitution den in a bid to end the tension. The Jamia Hafsa madrasa is already at the center of a two-month standoff after female students occupied a nearby government-run children’s library in protest at official plans to demolish a mosque in the capital.

Female student Seema Zubair, 20, told The Associated Press that a group of 30 female and 10 male students had broken into the brothel late Tuesday, which lies about five minutes walk from the mosque, after Shamim ignored their warning on Monday to close it.

“We are not authorized by the government to arrest them, but we are authorized by our religion, because this (prostitution) is evil,” Seema said.