Pakistanis buried bodies on Thursday from among more than 70 followers of a revolutionary cleric, a day after commandos killed the last few gunmen hiding in the ruins of the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, in Islamabad.
Anger at the government’s action ran deep in tribal parts of north-west Pakistan, though sentiment in most of the country sided with President Pervez Musharraf’s decision to send in the army.
Cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi was killed along with a handful of hardcore militants he had surrounded himself with, making a last stand in the basement of a religious school in the complex.
His elder brother Abdul Aziz, caught fleeing disguised as a woman in the early stages of a week-long siege, was allowed to accompany Ghazi’s body for a funeral at their ancestral village in eastern Punjab province.
Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri, in an internet video, called for revenge, stoking fears of a violent backlash from militants exporting the Taliban’s hardline version of Islam from the tribal badlands to Pakistani cities.
”If you do not retaliate … Musharraf will not spare you,” said Zawahri, believed to be hiding somewhere on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Well before dawn the first numbered wooden coffins were lowered into unmarked graves at a graveyard in the suburbs.
There were no relatives present.
DNA taken
A cleric read verses from the Qu’ran, though full funeral rites were not observed, according to a Reuters photographer present.
”We are burying them here until their relatives come and identify them,” said Rana Akbar Hayat, a senior city administrator supervising the burials.
”All the victims have been fingerprinted and photographed and their DNA test has been taken to help parents and relatives identity them, then the bodies will be handed over.”
Meanwhile, parents and relatives frantically searched hospitals, hoping to find missing children.
”I have searched almost every hospital in the city,” sobbed Noor Mohammad from Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region, whose 13-year-old son Mirza Alam was in the mosque when the commandos moved in.
”My elder son talked to Alam two days after the siege began and since then we have not heard from him.” Most sentiment in the country appeared to be that militant students in the Taliban-style movement had brought disaster on themselves.
But there were also large swathes of north-west Pakistan, particularly in tribal regions like Waziristan, where anti-government feelings were intensified.
A series of bomb attacks targeting security forces in the past week in which at least 20 people have been killed, the shooting of three Chinese on Sunday, and attacks on Western aid agencies working in a mountain town suggested the backlash was already under way.
‘Two children buried’
The radicals of Lal Masjid had turned their compound into a virtual fortress during a series of confrontations with the authorities over the last six months.
After clashes between militant students and paramilitary troops turned deadly on July 3, Musharraf ordered troops to lay siege. Commandos stormed the mosque-madrasa complex on Tuesday.
It took more than 24 hours to eliminate the final pocket of resistance, and it was not until Wednesday evening that the last survivor, a wounded militant, was found in a basement washroom.
After the complex was secured, soldiers began to comb the debris and military spokesperson Major-General Waheed Arshad said they had found 75 bodies, but the search was continuing.
Asked if any women or children were among the dead, he said nine of bodies had been burned beyond recognition. Earlier, he said he had no reports of women or children killed, though a municipal official said the bodies of two children were among 69 corpses buried on Thursday.
Nine members of the security forces were killed and 29 wounded in ”Operation Silence”, the codename for the assault carried out by 164 commandos.
The media was finally expected to be allowed in to see the aftermath of the battle in the mosque-madrasa compound, and Musharraf was expected to address the nation soon.
Arshad said 87 people came out after the assault began, including women, children and militants. – Reuters