Burqas become tools of disguise
When the leader of a besieged Pakistani mosque was caught trying to flee under a burqa, he joined a growing list of Islamists, security forces and journalists to use the garment as a disguise.
Police caught Abdul Aziz on Wednesday night when they spotted that his pot-bellied frame did not fit with the other black-burqa-clad women leaving the Red Mosque in Islamabad, where clashes with the military have killed 16 people.
Female students from the mosque became a symbol of growing extremism in the country when, wearing burqas and carrying wooden staves, they took control of a children's library and raided several music and video shops.
Aziz also appeared on state television on Thursday wearing a burqa which he then lifted at the interviewer's request to reveal his bearded face and a white prayer cap.
The cleric, who has led a drive to impose a Sharia justice system around the country, said there was a "provision in Islamic law that one can escape secretly" from a threatening situation to save one's life.
Used for hundreds of years as conservative female dress in Islamic countries, the burqa first came to public attention during the 1996-2001 rule of the ultra Islamic Taliban in Afghanistan, which forced women to wear them.
It was here too that their new role became famous.
BBC reporter John Simpson and a cameraman were smuggled from Pakistan into Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province after the 9/11 attacks by donning the all-covering garments on the advice of their helpers.
Simpson said it worked despite both of them being tall.
"Merely putting on the burqa, I found, has an extraordinary effect - it seems to make you disappear," he was quoted as saying at the time.
British newspaper journalist Yvonne Ridley was less lucky.
She followed Simpson's example while working for the Sunday Express newspaper but was discovered by the Taliban without a passport or visa.
Ridley was held for 11 days amid fears for her safety. One of her captors asked her to convert to Islam and she eventually did so in 2003.
Since then journalists have been reluctant to try the same trick, but it has not stopped participants on both sides of the "war on terror" that began with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
In March 2005, alleged al-Qaeda number three Abu Faraj al-Libbi was riding a motorbike through the northwestern Pakistani town of Mardan on his way to a rendezvous with a terror contact.
Several "women" in a nearby graveyard - in fact intelligence officers acting on a tip off - suddenly threw off the burqas they had been hiding under and gave chase.
He was caught soon afterwards and has since been transferred to the US prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
In March this year Afghan troops captured a senior Taliban commander who tried to escape a manhunt disguised as a woman wearing a burqa, the NATO-led force in the country said.
Soldiers at a checkpoint in the southern province of Kandahar "spotted the oddity" and held the man, identified as Mullah Mahmood, an alleged extremist commander and suicide attack facilitator.
A month later, in the Pakistani tribal region of South Waziristan, which borders Afghanistan, tribesmen involved in bloody infighting with foreign al-Qaeda militants stationed children at local checkpoints to check to ensure that people wearing burqas were women, officials said.
