Small groups of radical students trickled out from Islamabad’s besieged Red Mosque on Thursday, despite warning blasts overnight, raising fears hardcore militants were keeping some children as human shields.
The captured leader of the mosque’s Taliban-style student movement, in an interview broadcast on state television, said there were 850 students still inside, including 600 women and girls, but he said only 14 men were armed with Kalashnikovs.
At the start of the interview, Abdul Aziz dramatically lifted the black veil on a burqa like the one he was caught wearing the previous evening, to reveal the face dominated by a bushy grey beard, and described how he wanted to leave, but some women teachers persuaded girls to stay behind at a time of sacrifice.
”They are not being used as human shields, we only gave them passion for jihad,” Aziz said.
A colonel with paramilitary forces laying siege to the mosque gave a different account.
”Definitely, there are children. They’re mostly from remote areas,” Colonel Masha Allah said. ”Some of those who came out of madrasa told us that they had been locked in a room.”
Before dawn, security forces fired a series of ”warning blasts”, ratcheting up pressure on the hold-outs to surrender.
The blasts were followed by a loudspeaker announcement calling on students inside Lal Masjid to give up, a witness said.
Some gunfire also erupted but both the blasts and gunfire stopped after about 20 minutes.
By mid-morning around 60 students had left the sprawling, fortified compound housing the mosque and an adjoining girls madrasa, compared with Wednesday’s mass exodus of 1 200 students.
Hospital doctors said there were casualties during shooting overnight, raising prospects that the death toll will rise from an official tally of 16 since clashes first erupted on Tuesday.
An intelligence official said one student had been shot dead.
”One student is confirmed killed during the shooting early this morning. There are no reports of wounded,” he said.
The Lal Masjid movement is part of a phenomenon known as ”Talibanisation” — the spread of militant influence from remote tribal regions on the Afghan border into central areas.
Liberal politicians have for months pressed President Pervez Musharraf, who faces elections later this year, to crack down on the cleric brothers in charge of the mosque and their movement.
Seeking talks
The students carried out a series of provocative acts over the past six months, demanding the enforcement of strict Islamic law, while running a vigilante anti-vice campaign.
Abdul Aziz had threatened suicide attacks if force was used against his movement.
Aziz ran Lal Masjid with his brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who was still inside the mosque, defying orders to surrender.
Speaking to Reuters by telephone on Thursday morning, Ghazi said he would take a different approach from his brother to stave off more bloodshed.
”We are not criminals. We are not terrorists that we should surrender … we have said that we are ready for dialogue,” he said, adding that conditions had been relayed earlier to Chaudhry Shujaat Hussein, leader of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League.
Should an assault be launched, a security official told Reuters, military planners know the layout, where materials were stored, and the fighting strength of the mosque’s defenders.
One of the explosions overnight weakened the defences by bringing down part of a wall of the compound, and security forces also fired in teargas.
Hundreds of police and soldiers, backed by armoured personnel carriers and with orders to shoot armed resisters on sight, sealed off the mosque and imposed an indefinite curfew in the neighbourhood after Tuesday’s clashes.
The mosque has a long history of support for militancy but the latest trouble began in January when students, who range from teenagers to people in their 30s, occupied a library to protest against the destruction of mosques illegally built on state land.
They later kidnapped women, including some from China, who they said were involved in prostitution. They also abducted police and intimidated shops selling ”obscene” Western films.
A security official said a small, hard core at the mosque was unlikely to give up. Two bomb attacks on security forces on Wednesday in another part of the country killed 12 people and raised fears the mosque’s militant allies were hitting back. – Reuters