Pakistani police recover 68 students chained in Islamic seminary

Dec 13, 2011, 6:13 GMT

Islamabad - Police in southern Pakistan found 68 students chained and held in a basement of an Islamic seminary, officials said Tuesday.

The students, aged 4 to 54, were recovered late Monday in a raid on the Jamia Masjid Zakriya Kondali seminary in Sohrab Goth, a suburb of Karachi.

'Among the chained students were 14 children and 54 men,' said Nadeem Raoof, a police investigator.

'Parents and relatives had enrolled the students for their reformation because some of them were drug addicts and some more were simply mentally ill,' Raoof said. 'The seminary administration charged 5,000 rupees [around 57 dollars] a month from each family.'

Some students told the police and media that they had been tortured and that the organizers wanted to prepare them for jihad.

'We are being made mujahideen here,' one student told Geo television. 'We are being made Taliban here. They say you should get training here, then we will send you to fight.'

Police arrested one cleric from the seminary while four others managed to flee.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik directed the Karachi police to collect information about the students' families and determine whether they were being trained for terrorism.

Authorities have long suspected that some of the thousands of Islamic seminaries across Pakistan recruit fighters from among their students and send them for training to the tribal regions along the Afghan border.