Imran held, to be charged under terror law

However, he was promptly detained by radical students at the university and subsequently handed over to police. He was finally taken to an undisclosed location, TV channels here reported.

Before he was handed over to police, Khan, the leader of Tehreek-e Insaf party, was locked up in a building at the campus for almost 90 minutes by members of the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba (IJT), the student wing of the hardline Jamaat-e-Islami.

Speaking to reporters at the gate, Khan urged people to prepare for a campaign against President Musharraf and the Emergency.

Pakistani police said that Imran Khan will be charged under anti-terrorism legislation. “He will be charged under the anti-terrorism act,” Lahore police chief Malik Mohammad Iqbal told AFP.

“Through his speeches he has been inciting people to pick up arms, he has been calling for civil disobedience, he was spreading hatred,” Iqbal said.

Earlier police in Faislabad arrested Shah Mehmood Qureshi, a senior leader of Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), who was leading a “long march” against Emergency after the former Premier was put under house arrest here on Tuesday.

As he was being taken into custody, Qureshi said he had been illegally arrested along with three PPP members of the Punjab Provincial Assembly.

Bhutto on Wednesday strongly flayed Musharaf for the “crack down against pro-democracy forces”, terming the system in Pakistan “not only a military dictatorship” but “a classic police state.” “We are witnessing a farce in Pakistan,” Bhutto wrote in the Washington Post on Wednesday.