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.
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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.
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