Pakistan schools shut after threats

ISLAMABAD // Co-education schools and universities in three major central Pakistan cities have been temporarily closed after getting threats from the Taliban and al Qa'eda, school administrators and security sources said. The closures in Islamabad, Lahore and Faisalabad follow a botched intelligence operation to uncover a terrorist cell at a state-administered university in Islamabad, security sources said.

All sources requested anonymity and asked that the targeted institutions not be named, citing security concerns. Sources in Islamabad said administrators of three private coeducation school chains teaching British secondary school curricula had received telephone threats warning them to segregate their students by gender. The telephone threats began about a week ago, with the first received by the principal of an Islamabad school popular with the political and business elite and foreign diplomats.

The school was closed all of last week. The federal ministry of interior issued a general security warning late on Thursday, coinciding with the temporary closure of the visa processing section of the US Embassy. Teacher and student attendance in schools and colleges across the capital was minimal on Friday morning. Shortly before midday, following a meeting between security officials and school administrators, parents were summoned to collect their children and told that the institutions would stay closed at least until tomorrow morning and possibly until Tuesday.

Administrators said the schools and universities would reopen after enhanced security measures were taken, including the posting of armed police and paramilitary units, and rerouting of traffic. The administrators said students had already been instructed to stay inside school buildings to prevent them being targeted in the playgrounds, which are located between entrance gates and classrooms. "We are attempting to create a security buffer for the students, but we know there is little we can do to stop a suicide attacker," said an administrator of an Islamabad school campus.

School administrators in Lahore and Faisalabad, the two largest cities of central Punjab province, are taking similar precautions after the provincial home department warned them that a terrorist attack by local and foreign al Qa'eda militants, infiltrating from the South Waziristan tribal region, was "imminent within 10 days", according to sources close to Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab.

Parents with political connections had earlier kept their children home after being privately warned of the threat, a parent related to Mr Sharif confided. South Waziristan is home to Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan's top Taliban warlord, who has granted sanctuary to several thousand militants from Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Mehsud has claimed responsibility for the deadly March 30 attack on a police training school in Islamabad and has conveyed personal threats to Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, through journalists from the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) who attended a national convention of journalists' unions in Faisalabad about two weeks ago.

However, security sources said the threat to the schools in Islamabad was probably the work of the Swat chapter of the Pakistani Taliban, which has used similar scare tactics in the past to impose a "shadow government" in the NWFP. The Swat Taliban has used the cover of its February peace agreement with the NWFP provincial government to infiltrate units into neighbouring districts, including Haripur, which is separated from Islamabad by the Margalla Hills.

Security sources said the threat to schools in the capital grew after a raid by operatives of the military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate on a residential enclave housing employees of a state-administered university in Islamabad failed to capture the head of a terrorist cell. The raid, which took place in late March, was launched after ISI arrested an employee of the university in Peshawar.

Eyewitnesses said the handcuffed employee was taken into custody by a squad of plainclothes operatives who searched his three-room residence for several hours looking for a laptop computer. However, the family of the suspect had hurriedly left their home the previous day, travelling by taxi to the Karachi Colony commercial market of Islamabad, a hub of public transportation to the NWFP. "His mother said there had been a death in the family and they were going to attend the funeral," said the taxi driver, who also asked not to be named.

Another source close to the operation said a militants' mole inside the intelligence unit had tipped off the suspect about the impending raid. "The operation was a disaster. The terrorist got away and we have no idea where he went," he said. Sources at the university said the detainee was part of a small group of employees, including one senior member of the teaching faculty, who for two years have been preaching the militant ideology of the Swat Taliban to colleagues and residents in the vicinity.

The university administration has received two threatening letters demanding segregation of male and female students, according to employees. Security sources said the faculty member had not been questioned in connection with the university investigation or the threats. The government and school administrators said a decision on whether to allow students to sit examinations in May and June would be taken in light of the prevailing security situation.

thussain@thenational.ae