Karzai urges Pakistan to shut down madrasas

Washington, Sept 26: Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has urged Pakistan to shut down religious schools, or madrassas, which he says, are training suicide bombers and other kind of terrorists.

''There will not be an end to terrorism unless we remove the sources of hatred in madrassas, the training grounds and the reliance of some entities in that part of the world on extremism as instruments of policy,'' he said in a speech at the Wilson Center here yesterday.

Karzai is scheduled to meet the US President George W Bush later in the day today and the two leaders will have dinner with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf tomorrow which is described here trilateral meeting.

State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said tomorrow's meeting ''is aimed at assuring that we can all work better together to deal with the security issues that are there on the ground.'' Earlier, Karzai spoke of the upsurge of narcotics in Afghanistan which he said was feeding terrorism and is an embarrassment to the Afghan people.

He said that growing poppies to produce heroin represented about 30 per cent of Afghanistan's economy. ''It is a very serious problem.

It is what also is feeding terrorism,'' he said.

Karzai asked for international support to help Afghan government to redeem its commitment of completely eradicating poppy production in his country in ten years.

UNI