Pakistan will repatriate all foreign students of Koranic schools under a crackdown that has also seen 800 Islamic militant suspects arrested after the deadly London bombings, officials said yesterday.
"There are 1,400 foreign students in the Islamic seminaries in Pakistan, and we have decided to send all of them back to their countries," said Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao.
"We have decided to repatriate them because we don't want to see our country defamed if any of these students are found involved in any terrorist activities in future," he said.
President Pervez Musharraf said on Friday that foreigners and holders of dual citizenship would be expelled from Pakistan's madrasahs, but Sherpao stressed they would also have to leave soon.
"We are in the process of checking the visa documents of these students, and the ones whose time to stay in Pakistan has expired would be immediately repatriated to their countries," he told a Karachi function.
"We'll cancel the visas given to the rest and will repatriate those, too, to their countries," he said.
Musharraf also pledged to continue the sweeping raids, register all of Pakistan's more than 10,000 seminaries and enforce a ban on anti-Western sermons in his drive to dismantle the country's radical Islamic underground.
As he spoke on Friday, police arrested another 200 preachers and prayer leaders for delivering sermons inciting anti-Western and sectarian hatred, an official monitoring the crackdown said.
The latest round-up raised to 800 the number of detainees since Musharraf launched the crackdown last week under pressure from Britain to investigate Pakistani links in the July 7 London suicide attacks that killed 56 people including the four bombers.
"Police went into action in different parts of the country after Friday congregations, when provocative sermons were delivered by the accused," said the senior security official, who asked not to be identified.
Musharraf reiterated that Pakistan's religious schools would have to register by the end of the year and said he was in a stronger position now to launch a crackdown than three years ago, when a similar drive fizzled.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair urged Pakistan to move against radical madrasahs after news that some of the London suicide-bombers had recently visited Pakistan and that one may have studied in a madrasah there.
Musharraf reiterated that "till now there is no suspect arrested" in connection with the July 7 bombings.
"The investigation is going on. It's a little premature to draw a conclusion. It's a very tedious job," he said.
However, police this week made what they called an unexpected catch with the arrest of Hashim Qadeer, a suspect in the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Madrasahs offer free religious education and board for more than 1 million Pakistani children, especially in areas neglected by state education services, but some have been targeted for preaching a militant brand of Islam.
Musharraf stressed that not all madrasahs are hotbeds for hatred, calling them "the world's biggest non-governmental organization helping the poorest segment of the society."
"Don't think they are all negative, this is not the reality," he said.
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