About 700 radical Muslim students surrendered at a besieged mosque in the Pakistani capital on Wednesday, but thousands of militants remained inside a day after 16 people were killed in clashes.
Hundreds of soldiers and police sealed off the mosque and imposed an indefinite curfew in the neighbourhood after Tuesday’s bloodshed. Two deadlines for students to lay down arms passed and no new one was set.
The violence erupted after a months-long stand-off between the authorities and a Taliban-style movement based at Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, less than a couple of kilometres from Parliament and Islamabad’s protected diplomatic enclave.
Growing numbers of students took up an offer of safe passage and 5 000 rupees ($85) and left the mosque.
About 700, including over 100 women and girls, deserted the mosque. No one knows how many remain with officials giving estimates from several hundred up to 5 000.
”There was shooting all night. I am leaving, what else to do, I don’t want to get killed,” said Wahid (18). ”I don’t have a weapon. I don’t even know how to use them.”
Men who surrendered were herded onto police buses while the women, clad in black, all-enveloping burqas, were released.
Information Minister Mohammad Ali Durrani said more people were leaving the mosque than expected. He also said authorities had been forced to act.
”There was growing pressure from the media and the international community to contain it. The government was forced, compelled to do it,” he said.
Liberal politicians have for months pressed President Pervez Musharraf to crack down on Lal Masjid’s clerics, who have threatened suicide attacks if force was used against them.
There was no major firing on Wednesday but security forces fired teargas into the compound in the late afternoon, and some shots were fired from the mosque.
Deputy Interior Minister Zafar Warraich said armed resistors would be shot on sight.
”A bullet will be responded with by a bullet,” he said.
The violence comes at a bad time for Musharraf. He is preparing for presidential and general elections and is already struggling to dampen a campaign by lawyers and the opposition against his suspension of the country’s top judge in March.
The United States has stood by an ally crucial to any success in crushing al-Qaeda and the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, and a senior official said he understood Pakistan’s caution.
”I can understand, the government’s been very careful. There are women and children inside this mosque, they don’t want to go in with heavy force,” Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State, told reporters in Rome.
‘Talibanisation’
Overnight, power was cut off to the compound and surrounding neighbourhood and barbed wire laid across junctions.
The Information Ministry said 16 people had been killed in Tuesday’s clashes but some bodies could still be in the mosque. About 150 people were hurt, 54 with bullet wounds, others suffering from the effects of teargas.
The religious hardliners have confronted authorities for months, running a vigilante anti-vice drive and campaigning for strict Islamic law.
Authorities had not used force for fear it could provoke attacks or lead to casualties among female students at a religious school, or madrasa, in the mosque compound.
Some clerics tried mediating to end the stand-off.
”The talks appear to be heading nowhere,” Abdul Rashid Ghazi, deputy leader of the students, said by telephone from the mosque.
A young woman in the mosque compound was defiant.
”Nobody wants to leave. Your faith gets stronger in a situation like this,” the student, Mahira, said by telephone.
The students affiliated with the mosque range in age from teenagers to people in their 30s, most from conservative areas near the Afghan border.
The mosque has a long history of support for militant causes, but the latest trouble began in January when students occupied a library to protest against the destruction of mosques built illegally on state land. They later kidnapped women they said were involved in prostitution and abducted police.
The Lal Masjid movement is part of a phenomenon known as ”Talibanisation”, or the seeping of militancy from remote tribal regions on the Afghan border into central areas. – Reuters