Foreign Religious Students on the Run

KARACHI - Is the Indonesian student Gun Gun Rusman Gunawan, who has been recently arrested from Jamia Abu Bakr, a Karachi Salafi seminary, along with several other religious students, the younger brother of Riduan Isamuddin (also known as Hambali), who was arrested last month in Thailand as a top operator of the Indonesian terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah and handed over to the US authorities?

If he is, the government of Pakistan certainly didn't know about his credentials until some days before he was picked up. Hambali is blamed across Southeast Asia for a string of bomb explosions, including the car-bombing on the Indonesian resort island of Bali last October that killed 202 people.

A madrassah official from where his younger brother was supposed to have been arrested told TFT: "I have personally checked all the records of our two madressahs and find that no one by the name of Gun Gun Gunawan is registered there." However, Indonesian authorities have told the media that the younger brother of Hambali is among those arrested in Karachi recently. And the Pakistani authorities have belatedly confirmed his arrest.

Sources said that Pakistani intelligence agency officials raided two Salafi seminaries, Jamia Abu Bakar and Jamia Darasutul Islamia, in Karachi last week and took 15 students of Far Eastern origin into custody for their alleged connections with certain religious and sectarian groups that are acting against "the integrity of Pakistan". In another raid on September 23, four more students were picked up for having links with terrorist elements. "The intelligence agencies were acting on information received from the students arrested earlier", said one insider. These students have been identified as Furqan Abdullah, Ilham Sobandi, Dawood and Anwer Siddique. Until last Wednesday, a total of 19 students from the two madrassahs had been detained.

But immigration and passport officials, under whose legal cover the students have been detained, deny that they have been provided details of the charges. However, FIA sources confirmed to TFT that the arrests were at the behest of separate delegations from the home ministries of Indonesia and Malaysia to Pakistan last month which provided "evidence of their links with Al-Qaeda operative Hambali Riduan Isamuddin".

Government agencies also claim that some of the students were kept under "watch" for two months before they were picked up after establishing their links with other terrorist organizations operating in Afghanistan against Pakistan. The students are being interrogated by a joint FBI-Pak intelligence team. Their visas have been cancelled.

"Legal action will be taken against these foreigners if investigations reveal their culpability in any offence against the state of Pakistan", said Javed Iqbal Cheema, who is in charge of the Crisis Management Cell in Islamabad. Sources said ten of the 13 Malaysians were identified as M. Ikhwaq, Ahmed Firdaus, Radzi Amin, Ahmed Muaz, Abu Zar, Zubair, Faaiz Hasan, Seharun Nizam, Arfaeen and Tirmizi while the second Indonesian is Saifuddin who was a new entrant at Darasatul Islamia.

The Indonesian connection with jihad or "holy war" in Afghanistan is well known. During the 1980s many volunteers from the Islamic Youth Movement in Indonesia took part in the war against the Soviet Union. They were joined in recent years by as many as 300 fresh volunteers to fight the Americans in Afghanistan. But the fate of many was not known. Sources say that some had been killed or picked up and handed over to the FBI while others had disappeared into the mountainous borderlands and congested cities of Pakistan.

But the managements of the two seminaries insist that their students have no links with terrorism whatsoever. "The intelligence agencies had been harassing our students for quite some time. They would come at our madrassah every now and then and ask questions. And every time we responded patiently and showed them letters of permission from the ministry of interior given to our students from Africa and Southeast Asia," says Abdur Rehman Abid, the Organiser of Darasatul Islamia.

"On September 20, these officials stormed into our madrassah holding G-3 guns and demanded that we produce all our students of foreign origin. Then they arrested the Malaysian boys without giving us any reason for their action", says Abid.

"It is not a case of terrorism; it is a case of public relations by General Pervez Musharraf who wants to appease the Americans by showing them that Pakistan is actively taking part in their so called war against terrorism," says Allama Abdullah Ghazi, chief of Tehrik Ahle Hadith. He denies that the detained students were staying "illegally in Pakistan". "It is a farce; we have the home ministry's permission documents to prove our case".

The Salafis (Ahle Hadith) believe the government targeted their seminaries because of their radical stance against the United States' "expansionist designs." "We believe in jihad and history clearly shows we have never surrendered," Ghazi claims.

All the managements of the Ahle Hadith seminaries have got together to protest to the ministry of interior: There is a great sense of insecurity and harassment in the madrassahs, they claim. "We have also contacted the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal leadership and requested their help to help us out of this situation," Ghazi says.

Investigators, however, do not rule out the possibility that not all the detained students have links with some extremist groups. "Our reconnaissance surveys show that only some of these students have somehow got involved in anti-Pakistan activities," a senior investigator told TFT.

He said that the authorities do not know so far whether Gunawan is Hambali's eighth brother or not. "We have just read this in media reports and we are investigating it further."

Ghazi, however, flatly says that Hambali's brother was not among the students picked up from his madrassahs.

According to the National Research and Development Foundation, there are 586,000 religious students in roughly 4,000 seminaries in Pakistan. Of these students, 16,600 are foreigners. A bulk of the foreign students comes from Arab or African countries. But figures are not available to show how many come from Southeast Asian countries like Singapore, for example, where the government last year smashed several "jihadi" cells; or the Philippines, where the Al Sayyaf outfit in the Muslim south is striking terror in the hearts of Muslims and non-Muslims alike for its indiscriminate kidnappings to further its "jihad".

Reports also suggest that over 500 foreign national students who had been studying at seminaries in Pakistan have left in the last one year, many to South Africa, fearing crackdown in the wake of the ongoing operations against extremists.

"Pakistan is no longer a safe place for foreign students who are studying in our madressahs. Around 500 have already shifted to South Africa; others are also planning to pack their bags," says Mufti Mohammad Jamil, spokesman of the Federation of Madrassahs. These students belonged mostly to Arab and African countries.

Mr Ghazi confirms that the number of foreign students at Salafi seminaries has decreased substantially since Pakistan joined the US-led war against terrorism. "They were dejected and didn't want to go, but many feared they could be arrested in the name of al-Qaeda", he claims.