Pakistani authorities yesterday arrested 13 Malaysian suspected Islamic militants in a pre-dawn raid on a religious school in the crowded commercial capital Karachi, officials said.

"We have arrested 15 foreign students from Karachi this morning. Thirteen of them are Malaysian and two are Indonesian," Brigadier Javed Cheema, the head of the interior ministry's National Crisis Management Cell, told AFP.

To be deported

"All of them were involved in undesireable activites prejudicial to the interest of Pakistan," he said, refusing to elaborate.

A senior Karachi-based security official who joined the raid by Pakistani security and intelligence officials said four of those arrested were "suspected al-Qaeda activists."

Cheema said all 15 detainees would be deported to their home countries.

According to Karachi-based English-language daily Dawn, the arrest were made after Pakistan's Foreign Affairs Ministry received a list of suspects from both Malaysia and Indonesia. - AFP