Islamabad, Pakistan - In a late night raid, female Islamic students on an anti-vice drive abducted an alleged brothel owner and locked her up at their fundamentalist seminary in the Pakistani capital, police said Wednesday.
Authorities have arrested at least two of the seminary's teachers in connection with the abduction of the brothel owner and three of her relatives, including a six-month old baby. Students said the woman had ignored their warnings to close her business.
With jihadist songs playing on the loudspeakers of a neighboring mosque, about 200 students wearing black burqas and carrying wooden staves staged a protest at the school in the center of Islamabad on Wednesday, demanding their release.
The flouting of state authority by denizens of the Lal Masjid mosque, whose prayer leaders have long been suspected of links to a banned Sunni Muslim militant group, underscored Pakistan's ability to rein in extremist religious schools.
Abdul Rashid Ghazi, vice-principal at the Jamia Hafsa seminary, threatened jihad, or holy war, unless the women teachers were freed by 4 p.m. (1100GMT). He said this was in line with a religious decree issued by the Lal Masjid mosque's prayer leader — Ghazi's brother, Abdul Aziz.
"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."
The deadline passed without any immediate action, but earlier, male seminary students commandeered two police vehicles and beat another plainclothes officer with sticks.
Ghazi confirmed the students were holding "some police and drivers" inside the mosque as a reaction to the arrest of the two female seminary teachers and two other male employees. There was no immediate comment from police.
However, a police officer confirmed a number of the Jamia Hafsa seminary's teachers had been arrested Wednesday for holding an alleged brothel owner known as Aunty Shamim.
Authorities are holding negotiations with school administrators to hand over the woman to police but they are "being unreasonable," the officer said on condition of anonymity because he was unauthorized to make comments to the media.
"They have taken the law into their hands," the officer said.
Female seminary 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. She said the students abducted Shamim, her daughter, daughter-in-law and six-month old granddaughter.
"We are not authorized by the government to arrest them, but we are authorized by our religion, because this (prostitution) is evil," Zubair said.
Zubair said the women had been crying and screaming, and Shamim had been suicidal — at one point breaking a glass and threatening to cut herself with it. But she said the women, locked inside a room at the seminary, had since calmed down and were being treated with respect. She said they would not be harmed and would be released if they promised to close the brothel.
The Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad and associated seminaries have a reputation for preaching hardline Islam, and links to an outlawed militant group Sipah-e-Sahaba, accused in sectarian attacks on Shiite Muslims. Their defiance of the government has exposed its failure to regulate Pakistan's thousands of religious schools, even in the federal capital.
Since January, hundreds of its female seminary students have staged a sit-in at a municipal children's library next door, to protest authorities' demolition of mosques that have encroached on public land. They are refusing to vacate the library until all the mosques are rebuilt.