AP News, May 25th, 2007
Muslim radicals Thursday freed two police officers they abducted amid an effort to enforce a harsh interpretation of Islamic law that has raised alarm about the spread of religious extremism in Pakistan.
Abdul Rashid Ghazi, one of two brothers who run Islamabad's Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, said the officers seized last Friday by students at the pro-Taliban mosque were freed "in the spirit of Islamic brotherhood and humanity" after pleas from their relatives.
The cleric denied the release had anything to do with the gathering threat of a government raid and said his followers could abduct more police in future.
"There is no fear of any kind," he said.
The release took some of the steam out of an ongoing confrontation between authorities and the clerics, whose students have launched a freelance anti-vice campaign that has included threats to music stores and the abduction of an alleged brothel owner in the relatively affluent and secular capital.
The Taliban banned music, television and movies during their rule of neighboring Afghanistan, which was ended by a 2001 U.S.-led invasion.
Tensions escalated in the past week, when the students briefly kidnapped a total of seven police officers in an apparently unsuccesful bid to force the release of several of their colleagues from detention.
Opposition parties accuse intelligence agencies of manipulating the events to divert media attention from a crisis triggered by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's controversial suspension of the country's top judge, or as a ruse to justify declaring a state of emergency _ a conspiracy theory with considerable traction in Pakistan's murky politics.
But the theory raises doubts over what Musharraf, a key U.S. anti-terror ally, would gain from exposing the failure of his own policy to contain Islamic extremism. The general's standing appears shaky as he looks to extend his eight-year rule this fall.
