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Group of Pakistani police officers held hostage in mosque

A tense standoff developed yesterday between police and Islamic radicals at a mosque in the Pakistani capital after four officers were held hostage overnight, officials said.

Dozens of students from a seminary attached to the Red Mosque late on Friday seized four policemen and took them inside, demanding the release of 10 colleagues picked by intelligence agencies recently.

Armed police took up positions yesterday close to the mosque, while students armed with batons blocked some nearby roads.

The situation represented the latest in a series of challenges facing Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf amid a political crisis over the suspension of the country's top judge.

"We have made it clear to the government that we will not free the policemen until the release on bail of our students, some of them arrested on false charges of burning video CDs," mosque deputy Abdul Rashid Ghazi said.

Witnesses said tension was high around the mosque, which is close to the city's main Aabpara market.

Ghazi threatened reprisals countrywide if any operation was launched against the mosque or the seminary.

"Any operation will have disastrous consequences," Ghazi said, as authorities considered their options over how to deal with the crisis.

An interior ministry official said the government wanted a "peaceful solution to the row through negotiations," although efforts throughout the night failed to break the impasse.

A high-level meeting at the interior ministry late on Friday decided "not to use force to free the police and continued the path of negotiations for the sake of public safety," a senior government official said.

Last month the Red Mosque set up a self-styled Islamic court, which issued a fatwa, or religious decree, against the female tourism minister for hugging a French paragliding instructor after a charity jump.

The mosque's male and female students have also launched anti-vice patrols, targeting music and video shops.

They briefly kidnapped two policemen and three women, including an alleged brothel owner.

And they have refused to vacate a government children's library that they occupied in January. They were protesting the demolition of several mosques that the authorities said were built on illegally-occupied land.

Commentators have seen the problems with the mosque in the heart of the capital as an example of the creeping "Talibanization" of Pakistan by Islamic militants.

Dozens of suspected Islamic militants, meanwhile, ambushed a vehicle carrying eight government officials and kidnapped them in a troubled northwestern tribal region of Pakistan, officials said yesterday.

The officials, including five women, were abducted late on Friday as they traveled to the North Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan to inspect sites for development projects, said Arbab Mohammed Arif Khan, secretary for law and order in Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal regions.

"I can only confirm that a group of gunmen has kidnapped eight government officials and we are making efforts for their early recovery," he said, refusing to speculate who might have kidnapped the officials.
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