(CNSNews.com) - An attempt to organize a mixed-gender mini-marathon ran into trouble in Pakistan on Saturday when police disrupted the event and arrested scores of people, local media reported.

Organized by two human rights groups, the foot race in the city of Lahore was intended to highlight violence against women and promote "enlightened moderation" - a reference to President Pervez Musharraf's stated vision for the Islamic country.

"Women participants, along with their male companions, were manhandled, beaten up, dragged and bundled into police trucks," the daily newspaper Dawn reported.

"Those assembled at the stadium to take part in the [mini] marathon were scared away by the police, who threatened the intending participants with arrest if they did not disperse."

Among those arrested was Asma Jahangir, a Pakistani human rights campaigner in her 50s who serves as a United Nations special human rights official.

Opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister, condemned the clampdown, saying the police action showed the extent to which the government will go to deny citizens their right to freedom of movement, association and expression.

Bhutto said pictures of Jahangir and other women being roughed up by policemen were shameful.

"The brutality of the police in preventing what was intended to be a peaceful event has unmasked the true face of the state," said one of the organizing groups, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), in a press statement.

"The organizers had faced intimidation and harassment by the police days ahead of the event, in an attempt to coerce them into calling it off," it said. "Such behavior surely goes against the so-called 'enlightened moderation' that the country's rulers so fervently insist they are attempting to promote."

The police action was taken under Pakistan's notorious "section 144," a clause in the criminal code allowing the government to act preventively if it perceives threats to public order.

The section was enforced after police came under pressure from an alliance of radical Islamic parties, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), which opposed the idea of men and women running together.

The HRCP called for the lifting of section 144, which it said had repeatedly been used to suppress basic rights.

Shahbaz Bhatti, head of an organization representing minorities in Pakistan, issued a statement saying the actions damaged the country's image and strengthened those elements who want to turn the country into a fundamentalist state.

"Even if one was to criticize the organizers for wasting their time and energy on an issue which had little application to the vast mass of the citizenry, and which tended against our social and cultural norms to boot, that is to miss the point," the English-language daily The Nation said in an editorial.

"They were peaceable citizens, and to deal with them as if they were hardened criminals with records of violence is to reflect a frightening mindset: that force is the answer to all problems, that even the semblance of resistance cannot be tolerated."

Earlier this year, Musharraf was quoted as saying that Pakistanis who objected to women taking part in public sporting events should turn off their TV sets.

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