ISLAMABAD, July 27: Security forces have rounded up about 600 suspected militants in a week-long crackdown that followed the July 7 London attacks, officials told AFP on Wednesday. Raids were continuing and police and security agencies were on the lookout for more suspects across all four provinces and in Azad Kashmir, they said.

Of those arrested, 295 belonged to militant outfits banned by President Pervez Musharraf in the past three years.

“They have been held under the Anti-Terrorism Act, which gives police authority to keep them under detention for a year without indicting them before a court,” a senior interior ministry official told AFP. The remaining 300 detainees included clerics, mosque prayer leaders and others taken into custody for inciting anti-Western and sectarian hatred through sermons and provocative literature, he said.

“The campaign against militancy and extremism is ongoing, and the police are on alert to nab elements promoting extremism and violence,” the official said. Police launched the raids after British Prime Minister Tony Blair urged Pakistan to move against madressah following news that three of the London bombers — Britons of Pakistani descent — had recently visited Pakistan.

Pakistani officials have denied the crackdown is linked to the attacks in London, which killed at least 52 people and the four suicide bombers. Gen Musharraf has come under pressure from fundamentalist Islamic groups, including the six-party alliance Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) which called the crackdown as “state terrorism” and accused Musharraf of being a ‘Western puppet’.

The religious right has accused Musharraf of staging the raids as a public relations exercise to please Western allies. Other commentators charge he is caving in to fundamentalists at home on a number of social issues, from blasphemy laws to women’s rights.

A group representing religious schools said on Wednesday the country would face “dire consequences” unless the crackdown ends.

“We demand that the crackdown (against madressahs) end at once,” the leader of an alliance of Pakistani Islamic schools, Munibur Rehman, told a news conference. Mr Rehman said the alliance would cooperate with the government if evidence was provided that a madressah was involved in militancy and extremism.

Madressahs offer free education and board for more than one million Pakistani children, especially in areas neglected by state education services, but critics say that some schools teach an extremist interpretation of Islam. Thousands of hardline schools were set up, with US and Saudi funding, as indoctrination and military training sites during the 1979-89 Afghanistan war.

Musharraf, a key ally in the US-led “war on terror”, has repeatedly vowed to curb extremism in Pakistan, which also gave logistic support to the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan.—AFP