Pakistani Students Abduct Brothel Owner

Veiled female students of an Islamic seminary "Jamia Hafsa" hold bamboos as they chant slogans during a protest demanding the released of their teachers, Wednesday, March 28, 2007 in Islamabad, Pakistan. Authorities have arrested four of the seminary's teachers in connection with the abduction. With jihadist songs playing on the loudspeakers of a neighboring mosque, about 200 students staged a protest at the school Wednesday demanding their release. (AP Photo) (AP)

Local police chief Omar Hayyat said hundreds of fighters fought an hours-long gunbattle with security forces, killing one paramilitary policeman.

The militants abducted Farid Ullah, the principal of the Oxford Public School where Monday's fighting took place, and one of his brothers, Hayyat said. The militants later fired rockets at a police station and other nearby government buildings and set two banks on fire.

A local militant told the AP they were questioning the principal to determine whether he had alerted police about the presence of their associates at the school.

"We will kill him if we find him guilty," the militant said on condition of anonymity because he didn't want security forces to discover his identity.

The attack on Tank demonstrated authorities' weak control in a swath of territory along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where Taliban guerrillas find sanctuary. The United States fears al-Qaida is trying to regroup in the same area.

Ayesha Siddiqa Agha, an Islamabad-based political and defense analyst, said the government had no clear policy on how to counter either militants or religious fundamentalists.

She said the student campaign in Islamabad, one of Pakistan's most liberal cities, had worrying similarities to the social strictures of the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

"They are going to turn into a moral police," Agha said. "That is not a situation in which I would want to live."

___

Associated Press writers Thaksina Khaikaew and Stephen Graham in Islamabad and Ishtiaq Mahsud in Tank contributed to this report.