Pakistan is questioning 13 Malaysian and two Indonesian students suspected of links to the Jemaah Islamiyah regional terror network, an intelligence official said.

The 15 students were arrested yesterday at the request of their respective countries in pre-dawn raids on three religious schools and some hostels in Karachi - the port city of 14 million where hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives have hidden - after several weeks of surveillance, the official said.

The students were suspected of activities "not in Pakistan's national interest," he said, declining to elaborate.

"There is a possibility that some of them have links with Jemaah Islamiyah," he told AFP on condition of anonymity.

JI, with links to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, is blamed for a string of attacks in Indonesia including Christmas Eve church bombings that killed 19 people in 2000, the Bali blasts last October that killed 202 people and a car bombing Aug 5 at the JW Marriot hotel in Jakarta that left 12 dead.

The interior ministry's National Crisis Management Cell director, Brigadier Javed Cheema, said the students were involved "in undesirable activites prejudicial to the interest of Pakistan," and would all be deported.

Military training

Several members of the Southeast Asian network are reported to have undergone military training at former al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and spent time in Pakistani religious schools.

The 15 were picked up from the Abu Bakar, Ashraful Madaris and Darul Islam madrassas and private hostels in eastern Karachi's Gulshan-e-Iqbal district and taken to a secret location in Karachi for interrogation by Pakistani intelligence agents, the intelligence official said.

US Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) agents may be invited to join the questioning.

"The request for their arrest came from their respective countries, who have sought their deportation. They may be in a better position to confirm links of some of them with Jemaah Islamiyah," he said.

A report from Jakarta, however, said Indonesia's envoy in Islamabad had not been notified of the arrests nor the detained Indonesians' location and has protested to the Pakistani government.

None of the detainees admitted to links with extremist groups, the intelligence officer said.

"They only admitted they had overstayed their visas, but said they were just devoted Muslims and students," he said.

Breeding grounds

Indonesia's acting consul general in Karachi identified the Indonesian detainees as Gungun Rusman Gunawan, 27, and Saifuddin, both students at the Abu Bakar school who hailed from Indonesia's main Java island. Saifuddin was a new student.

Many of Pakistan's 10,000 religious schools are considered breeding grounds for extremism. Thousands of their students joined the hardline Taliban militia, which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

Under efforts to regulate the schools since last year, Pakistan has been cracking down on foreign students who overstay their visas and has banned foreign funding.

Meanwhile, Malaysian police chief Norian Mai told national news agency Bernama that the police were in contact with the Pakistani authorities on the arrests of the students.

According to Norian, the arrested students, some of them in their teens, were believed to have been exposed to militant teachings either sponsored by the al-Qaeda or other Islamic militant groups. - AFP