Islamabad: Pakistan will expel around 300 foreign students from Islamic seminaries or madrasas in the country if they failed to get permission from the government to stay, a senior official said on Tuesday.
The move is part of a drive to counter religious extremism and terrorism in the wake of the July 7, 2005 attacks in London when at least one of the suicide bombers was believed to have spent time at a Pakistani madrasa.
Syed Kamal Shah, permanent secretary at the Interior Ministry, said 600 to 700 foreign students were currently enrolled with seminaries across the country.
"Fifty per cent of them have already got permissions from their governments," he said.
"We will expel (the remaining) if their governments don't give them No Objection Certificates for their stay," he said.
Shah did not specify the countries involved, but officials earlier have said students in the madrasas belonged to Southeast Asia, Europe, North America and Africa.
President Pervez Musharraf had announced expulsion of all foreign religious students from the country by the end of 2005, as their presence was giving Pakistan a bad reputation as a breeding ground for militancy.
When Musharraf issued those orders, he said there were over 1,000 in the country. Officials say many students had since left Pakistan.
The government later relaxed the orders in a compromise with clerics in charge of the madrasas, but the authorities have recently turned down extensions to students' visas and threatened them with deportation.
Last month, Islamic seminaries pledged to resist moves to expel foreign students. Pakistan has about 12,000 madrasas, which provide education, shelter and food to boys from poor families.
But a few are suspected of teaching militancy. The country saw a spectacular rise in the number of madrasas in the 1980s, when the schools, backed by funding from the Western and Arab countries, became recruiting grounds for Islamic volunteers fighting Soviet forces in neighbouring Afghanistan.
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