ISLAMABAD, 21 May 2007 — Authorities beefed up security and erected roadblocks leading to the Red Mosque in Islamabad as the mosque leader threatened to launch jihad if the government stormed the mosque and the adjoining madrasa. Another report said a heavy contingent of police was deployed near the building in what seemed to be a precursor to a showdown.
Abdul Rashid Ghazi, a senior prayer leader of the mosque said earlier yesterday two abducted policemen will remain in detention unless authorities freed nine religious students. “We will let them go once the authorities release our people,” Ghazi told Reuters.
Four plainclothes men were snatched on Friday by students from outside the mosque in the heart of Islamabad, but two were released a day later as a “gesture of goodwill,” Ghazi said.
A court in Islamabad also ordered on Saturday the release on bail of five of the students, but they were still being held because the bail money had not been paid.
“They have not released our people and we don’t know their whereabouts,” Ghazi complained. But authorities freed two students later yesterday.
Hundreds of students from the mosque’s seminary in downtown Islamabad have carried out anti-vice campaigns in the relatively liberal capital, warning music shops and brothels to close.
Islamabad police chief Chaudhry Iftikhar Ahmed warned the students that the government was considering all options, including the use of force, to secure the officers’ freedom.
“We would like that ... they release the policemen so that the government does not have to use force,” Ahmed told the Associated Press yesterday.
“We are not negotiating anything with them. We are giving them time; hopefully, some better sense will prevail,” Ahmed said.
“Imam (head) of the mosque Maulana Abdul Aziz has declared that if the government uses force we will wage jihad,” Ghazi told reporters at the mosque.
Dozens of stick-wielding students, many wearing prayer caps and turbans, surrounded the red-brick building.
Pakistan’s Geo TV reported that police had diverted traffic from streets near the mosque, as tension in the standoff over the abducted officers appeared to be intensifying.
Ghazi said over the weekend that the students detained the officers because they were standing outside the madrasa despite an agreement with authorities that police would not be deployed there.
The abductions were in retaliation for the madrasa students detained by intelligence agents in the past two weeks, he said.
Liberals have been disturbed by the government’s failure to act more forcibly against religious extremists in the face of what the media is calling a growing trend of “Talebanization” in Pakistan.
