By DPA
Lahore/Islamabad : Pakistani police Wednesday detained cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan hours after he appeared at the first major student demonstration against the emergency rule imposed by President Pervez Musharraf.
The plainclothes police took him into a building on the campus of Punjab University in the eastern city of Lahore, a DPA correspondent said from the scene.
Almost an hour later, the opposition leader was whisked away in a police van.
The Tehreek-e-Insaf leader has been in hiding since the imposition of emergency rule on Nov 3 and has issued statements urging the students to rise against “the military dictatorship of General Musharraf”.
His appeals did not seem to go unheard as more than 400 students gathered Wednesday, chanting slogans like “Go, Musharraf, go!”
“Musharraf is totally wrong,” student Ahsan Taj said. “We are against him, and we are against his policies.”
Musharraf, who seized power in a bloodless 1999 coup, proclaimed a state of emergency, citing rising Islamic militancy as the main reason, but his critics said they believed the measure was used to sack top judges who he thought would rule against his re-election last month.