ISLAMABAD, March 30: Ms Shamim Akhtar, the woman abducted and disgraced by the Lal Masjid brigade on the charge of running a brothel, has quit the city for the fear of her life.

Sources in Islamabad administration on Friday confirmed to Dawn she had left the city along with her young daughter.

“Now that she has left the city, Islamabad police cannot provide her security,” said a senior officer of the administration which looks helpless in the face of rising religious militancy in the capital.

Ms Shamim, her daughter, and her daughter-in-law along with her six-month-old baby, were seized from their house in G-6 by the girls of Jamia Hafsa madressah in a raiding party from the Lal Masjid on Tuesday night.

They were freed on Thursday after Ms Shamim confessed to the charge of leading an immoral life. Once home, she said the confession was forced on her with threats of dire consequences if she retracted it.

Though Ms Shamim’s son Kamran Mehdi, a government servant, was said to be still living there with his wife and baby daughter, the house on Friday gave a deserted look.

Ms Shamim was said to be extremely fearful and under severe mental and psychological stress.

Meanwhile, Minister of State for Information Tariq Azeem has said the government was seriously looking into the illegal acts of Jamia Hafsa students.

“People are demanding that government should do something,” he said when Dawn asked if any action was planned against the management of Lal Masjid and the seminary.

Certainly, the government will not allow anyone to challenge its writ, pick people from their houses, illegally occupy government property and take law in one’s hands. Mr Azeem said the management of Lal Masjid was taking undue advantage of the government’s soft attitude and efforts to avoid any loss of life.

Neighbours of Ms Shamim approached by Dawn said the goings on in her house worried them but they disapproved of the way the family was captured by madressah students. They said her connections in police and bureaucracy prevented them from voicing their concerns.

However, neighbour Nisar Ahmed rejected Ms Shamim’s charge that Jamia Hafsa girls had mistreated the family.

“I was witness to the drama when she was picked up. Some 15 to 20 girls, who had already given a warning to Ms Shamim to stop immoral activities in the area, reached her house in a van along with some male students.

Only girls entered the house, seized the three women and put them into the vehicle and took them to Lal Masjid,” he said.

Residents of the area pleaded that the action against Ms Shamim should not be given sectarian colour.

Benazir: Chairperson Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Benazir Bhutto said on Friday that the Madressah Hafsa incident has given rise to suspicions that under the present government Pakistan was moving towards Talibanisation because the military regime seeks international community’s support.

Ms Bhutto condemned the incident of Wednesday when the girls students of an Islamabad seminary took law into their own hands as the police and law enforcing agencies turned a blind eye to it.

In a statement issued from Dubai and released by the party’s media office here on Friday, Ms Bhutto said the images of ‘burqa- clad’ and stick-wielding women holding policemen hostage, forcing shopkeepers to shut their business and kidnapping a family of three women accusing them of loose morals had done incalculable damage to the image of the country in the community of nations.