The reported involvement of students in terrorism and militancy has prompted the administrations of two public sector universities of Karachi to start discussing how security issues in institutions of higher level should be dealt with more effectively. On Tuesday the Academic Council of Karachi University held a meeting on the increasingly critical subject. The other institution to hold such a meeting was NED University of Engineering and Technology.
The meetings came just days after the security guard of a leader of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement Pakistan and a teenager were shot dead on Saturday. The politician himself, Khawaja Izharul Hassan, escaped unhurt in the attack in the Buffer Zone area.
A militant group calling itself Ansarul Shariah Pakistan claimed responsibility for the Eid Day shooting. Security agencies identified the alleged mastermind of the shooting as Abdul Karim Sarosh Siddiqui. He is said to have been a student of Karachi University's Department of Applied Physics in 2011.
One of the other assailants, identified as just Hassaan, is said to have been a lab technician in Dawood University of Engineering and Technology. He was killed in uncertain circumstances. CCTV (closed circuit television) footage on the incident showed he was subjected to torture by a crowd before he was killed. However, law enforcement agencies said it is they who killed him in an encounter.
Students' involvement in terrorist activities is hardly a new phenomenon in Pakistan. Saad Aziz, a suspect of the Safoora Goth carnage in May 2015, was a student of the Institute of Business Administration, Noreen Leghari, an MBBS student at the Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences in Hyderabad, was found to have connections with the international terrorist group which calls itself Islamic Sate (IS).
In another incident, last April, a student of mass-communication at Khan Abdul Wali Khan University in Mardan was lynched by a vigilante mob, their allegation being that he had been publishing blasphemous content online. According to news circulating in mainstream media, Karachi University has decided to share records related to its students with the intelligence agencies. But in a detained statement the university's spokesman rejected the reports.
"A meeting was held and it was decided that KU will coordinate and take assistance from the law enforcing agencies for the security of the students taking every possible measure," reads the statement "The news circulating on various news channels that records of KU students are under check and compulsion of submission of clearance certificate from the relevant police station for students taking admissions, such news are baseless and contrary to the facts, any such decision hasn't been taken yet." it added.
University students themselves had mixed reactions to questions as to whether their data should be shared with intelligence agencies. "Sharing of students' data with the secret agencies would help discourage the militant mindset prevailing within the youths," a student of Karachi University remarked. But another said it would be wrong to share students' records with intelligence agencies and that any action against terrorists and militants was the responsibility of the agencies themselves, not students.