Musharraf made his remarks in an interview aired late Friday by the private Aaj television channel after four plainclothes officers were captured while patrolling in the capital, Islamabad, near the Lal Masjid mosque notorious for launching its own anti-vice campaign.

The president said that militancy in Pakistan was increasing, and "we need to strongly counter it." Musharraf did not elaborate.

His comments came as Abdul Rashid Ghazi, a cleric at Lal Masjid, said his students detained the officers because they were standing outside a seminary linked to the mosque despite an agreement with authorities that police would not be deployed there.

He said the abductions were in retaliation for intelligence agents detaining eight or nine of its students in the past two weeks. However, he said the police would be freed later Saturday because they were not intelligence agents.

Area police official Mohammed Dilshad confirmed the abductions, saying negotiations with Lal Masjid were under way, and the issue would hopefully be resolved "very soon."

Critics have accused Musharraf's government of appeasing the religious vigilantes despite concerns that pro-Taliban hard-liners, intent on enforcing a stringent version of Islamic law or Shariah, are gaining sway in Pakistan.

Last month, female students at Lal Masjid on a freelance anti-vice campaign sprung to prominence by kidnapping an alleged brothel owner and forcing her to make a confession. The mosque later declared it had set up its own Islamic court, and threatened music and movie shops to close.

Earlier dozens of gunmen ambushed a vehicle carrying eight government officials and kidnapped them in a troubled northwestern tribal region of Pakistan, officials said yesterday.

The officials, including five women, were abducted late Friday when they were going to the North Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan, said Arbab Mohammed Arif Khan, secretary for law and order in Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal regions."We are making efforts for their early recovery," said Khan, who refused to speculate who might have kidnapped the officials.