A Pakistani cleric said a bid to shoot down President Pervez Musharraf’s plane was apparently in revenge for the bloody government siege of his mosque, in which he alleged that 70 students had died.
The claim came as fighting intensified on the fifth day of the stand-off between radicals holed up in the bullet-scarred Red Mosque in Islamabad and security forces, with gunfire and blasts echoing around the city.
It indicates that military ruler Musharraf, a key United States ally, faces a serious backlash from Islamic militants for his determination to drive out mullah Abdul Rashid Ghazi and hundreds of his diehard followers.
”I received a telephone call yesterday [Friday] from a man I did not know,” who offered his ”congratulations” before news of Friday’s attack on Musharraf’s aircraft became public, Ghazi told Agence France-Presse (AFP) by telephone.
”He said, ‘I fired at Musharraf’s plane just a while ago.’ He said that Musharraf survived,” said Ghazi, the deputy leader of the mosque.
Security officials said earlier they were probing possible links between the operation and the failed bid to shoot down the plane as it took off from a military airbase at Rawalpindi, near Islamabad.
Musharraf has survived at least three other militant attempts to kill him.
Police have said they found two anti-aircraft guns and a machine gun on the roof of a house near the airbase after the attack.
Pressure mounts
An experienced anti-terrorism official said the shooting was probably planned in advance ”but because of the events of [the] Red Mosque they might have advanced the plan and faltered.”
Pressure mounted on those inside the mosque to surrender.
Fierce clashes accompanied by deafening blasts erupted in the dead of night and again at lunchtime on Saturday, when mosque students exchanged gunfire with troops and hurled grenades.
A government security official said troops were showing restraint because of the presence of children and women in the complex ”but they cannot allow the militants inside the mosque to keep targeting security forces”.
However, Ghazi said that Pakistani forces had so far killed up to 30 female and 40 male students in the siege of the mosque. The government insists that the toll is 19, including a soldier and several civilians.
”We buried the women because we did not want postmortems to be conducted as they are un-Islamic,” Ghazi said.
A group of Islamist MPs said troops stopped them from entering the mosque to negotiate with Ghazi, whose brother, mosque leader Abdul Aziz, was captured by police on Wednesday while trying to flee dressed in a burqa.
”We have been prevented because the forces of Musharraf are hell-bent on spilling the blood of women and children,” said hardline MP Maulana Shah Abdul Aziz, the leader of the delegation.
But Ghazi, who repeated his determination to die rather than surrender, said the mosque had enough rations, arms and ammunition to ”fight for another 25 to 30 days and we will do that, God willing.”
In a blow to the mosque’s resistance, police in a pre-dawn swoop seized control of a separate radical madrassa affiliated to it, the Jamia Faridia religious school, without a shot being fired, officials said.
Police said the Jamia Faridia was the ”powerhouse” for the Red Mosque and that several students were involved in the current violence.
Authorities had feared that male students from the school — founded in the 1980s to train anti-Soviet fighters for Afghanistan — would open another front against the government.
”Police stormed into Jamia Faridia and arrested dozens of students and shifted them to an unknown place,” a senior security official told AFP.
Dozens of police on Saturday morning guarded the religious school, which is located in the upscale E-7 neighbourhood where several ministers live, about 3km from the mosque in the G-6 area.
Students from the mosque and the madrassa had irked the government since January with a Taliban-style anti-vice campaign, which involved the abduction of several people they linked to prostitution, including seven Chinese. – AFP
