A Pakistani Special Forces commander was killed after coming under heavy fire from militants holed up inside the Red Mosque in Islamabad early on Sunday.
Islamist rebels shot Lieutenant Colonel Haroon Islam and another soldier as they laid bombs along the perimeter wall of the besieged mosque at 1.30am. Moments later three giant explosions breached the wall but Lt Col Haroon, died in hospital.
His death upped the stakes for President Pervez Musharraf as the siege of the radical mosque stretched into its sixth day, with positions hardening on both sides and signs that public patience was starting to fray.
In his first comments since the crisis erupted on Tuesday, a belligerent Musharraf warned the militants to ”surrender or die”. The embattled chief cleric inside the mosque, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, retorted that his followers would rather perish as martyrs than give themselves up. He hoped their deaths would spark an Islamic uprising across Pakistan.
”We have firm belief in God that our blood will lead to a revolution,” the radical cleric said in a statement issued to national newspapers. ”God willing, Islamic revolution will be the destiny of this nation.”
Musharraf said he was reluctant to order a full-scale assault on the bullet-pocked compound, a kilometre from his Islamabad office, for fear of sparking a bloodbath among hundreds of non-combatant civilians presumed to be sheltering inside. Instead his troops have employed psychological scare tactics, subjecting the mosque to intermittent barrages of gunfire and explosions in the hope of forcing the militants to abandon the fight.
But a flood of escapees last week, when 1 200 mostly teenage men and women got out, has reduced to a trickle. Only 20 people have left the mosque since Friday, and just two on Sunday, who slipped through the breaches made by the blasts.
According to reports the chief cleric is holed up inside a bunker in the mosque basement, surrounded by 50 militants, some with combat experience from Kashmir and Afghanistan. They are armed, according to the government.
The Interior Minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, said several hundred women and children were being held hostage in an upstairs hall where militants were firing on the army through ventilation ducts. The chief cleric denied holding human shields and claimed that 300 of his students died under government fire on Saturday night — a charge the minister for information derided as ”lies”.
A delegation of politicians from conservative religious parties, who hoped to broker a peace deal, was unable to reach the mosque.
Water, power and gas have been cut to the surrounding neighbourhood, which is under curfew. Residents trying to sleep through gunfire and explosions complain of frayed nerves. – Guardian Unlimited Â