Lucknow, March 16: Madarsas in Varanasi town today tried to shut the door on militancy by deciding on stricter background checks before admitting outstation students.

Continuing the efforts to distance religion from terrorism, two clerics of the town issued separate fatwas against the March 7 bombers, condemning their act as un-Islamic and demanding punishment for them.

The fatwas were the first against the bombers, coming four days after leading Hyderabad clerics had issued decrees asking militant organisations not to name themselves after Prophet Mohammad.

The tightening of seminary admission rules comes after the blast investigation turned its gaze on a madarsa in the district following the discovery that five of its students ? all Kashmiris ? had disappeared on the day of the bombings. They are alleged to have made scores of calls to overseas contacts from their mobiles in the days before the carnage.

One of the students’ friends has been picked up from the madarsa for interrogation.

“This prompted other madarsas to review their admission procedure,” an official of the Anjuman Intezamia Masjid, a Varanasi madarsa, said over the phone. “We don’t want to be seen as harbouring jihadis,” Mohammed Yasin added.

He said office-bearers from 11 of the town’s 20 madarsas met at the Jamia Salfia Urdu University today. They drew up guidelines for all 20 on background checks on admission-seekers as well as students already enrolled with them.

All admission-seekers would now have to produce attested documents certifying their date of birth and address, as well as transfer and character certificates from their previous institution. Each document must carry an attested, recent photograph of the candidate.

The meeting was presided over by Badrealam Qureshi, an advocate and secretary of one of the madarsas. Among those who attended were leading Muslim scholars and officials of educational institutions ? such as the Jamia Islamia, Jamia Salfia, Jamia Matluloom and Jamia Farooqia ? as well as one of the clerics who issued the fatwas, Maulana Abdul Batin Nomani.

Nomani, the Mufti-e-Banaras, warned those looking to destroy peace and harmony through terror attacks. Wherever they did it, they only brought disrepute to their society and religion, he said.

The fatwa by Mohammad Taisaruddin of the Madars-e-Majidiam suggested it would not be a crime to lynch those involved in the blasts.

The state special task force today detained six persons. Two of them are relatives of an accused in the Hanumangarhi blast that killed 10 people in 2001. Dismissed as a gas cylinder explosion then, it is now thought to have been the first “pressure-cooker bomb” to have exploded in the state.