Religious scholars gathered outside a besieged Pakistani mosque on Monday, asking Islamist militants to send out dead and wounded along with women and children, a day after authorities gave "a final warning" to surrender.
Pakistani commandos blew holes in the walls of a mosque compound on Sunday in hope hundreds of women and children could escape, while security forces besieged a revolutionary cleric leading Islamist gunmen inside. Troops have surrounded the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, in Islamabad since Tuesday.
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
Heavy exchanges of fire erupted on Friday between Islamist militants holed up in a Pakistani mosque and security forces after the militants’ leader said he and his hundreds of followers would rather die than surrender. Earlier, gunmen fired at Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s plane as it took off from Islamabad’s military airport.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s plane was fired on as it took off on Friday from a military airfield in Rawalpindi, an intelligence officer said, contradicting official denials. Musharraf’s plane arrived safely in the south-western town of Turbat, where the president visited flood victims, and the military denied there had been any attack.
Isolated shots rang out as a group of worried parents entered a besieged mosque in Islamabad on Friday to collect children caught up in a deadly stand-off between Islamic radical students and security forces. A cleric leading the Taliban-style movement at Red Mosque said overnight that he and hundreds of followers were willing to surrender.
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 said there were 850 students inside.
Pakistani security forces fired a series of ”warning blasts” before dawn on Thursday near Islamabad’s radical Red Mosque, stepping up pressure on hundreds of militant students inside to surrender, a security official said. There were about eight explosions at intervals of several minutes, witnesses said.
Fresh gunfire erupted at a besieged mosque in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Wednesday as about 1 000 militant students showed their defiance after 700 others surrendered to the government. Helicopter gunships circled overhead and armoured personnel carriers surrounded Lal Masjid, or the Red Mosque.
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. Hundreds of soldiers and police sealed off the mosque and imposed an indefinite curfew in the neighbourhood after Tuesday’s bloodshed.
Pakistani security forces fought fierce gun battles with students at a pro-Taliban mosque in Islamabad on Tuesday after a lengthy stand-off exploded into violence, leaving nine dead and 140 hurt. Clerics at the radical Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, threatened suicide attacks to avenge the "blood of martyrs" after the day-long clashes.
Forget Freddy Krueger and Norman Bates — here comes Burqa Man. The first serious Pakistani horror flick for a quarter of a century features a psychopath dressed in a blood-soaked version of the traditional garb of Islamic women. Hordes of zombies, including an undead dwarf, add to the gore in the self-financed Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground).
Pakistani traders on Thursday announced a reward of 10-million rupees (%165 000) for anyone who beheads Salman Rushdie following Britain’s decision to award the novelist a knighthood. The announcement came during a protest by 200 traders at Aabpara market, one of the main bazaars in the capital, Islamabad.
Pakistan on Monday deplored Britain’s decision to award a knighthood to author Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses outraged many Muslims around the world. Rushdie was awarded a knighthood for services to literature in Queen Elizabeth’s birthday honours list published on Saturday.
The intense heatwave in Pakistan and India claimed 156 more lives, raising the death toll due to oppressive heat conditions in the two countries to at least 340, media reports and officials said on Tuesday. Eighty-two people perished in the heatwave in Pakistan, with 75 deaths being reported from the central province of Punjab.
People who urinate in public are ruining Islamabad’s image as the cleanest, most civilised city in Pakistan, a newspaper said on Monday. In a front-page article under the headline ”Public peeing: It’s disgusting, but who cares?” the Daily Times said the problem is caused by the expensive, unhygienic and often broken facilities provided by city authorities.
The Pakistani prime minister’s charm failed to work its magic on steely United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice according to a new biography of her, the <i>Dawn</i> daily reported on Monday. The book describes in excruciating detail how Shaukat Aziz allegedly tried to impress Rice when she visited South Asia in March 2005, according to the newspaper.
Pakistan’s Test opening batsman Imran Farhat was fined half his match fee on Friday for criticising the chief selector, the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) said. Farhat made a strong-worded phone call to the PCB’s chief selector Salahuddin Ahmed after batsman was not picked up for the one-day international series against Sri Lanka.
Pakistan said on Tuesday it expects to hear ”conclusive” word in about two weeks’ time on how national cricket coach Bob Woolmer died during the recent World Cup.
Jamaican investigators ”will take 10 to 15 days to come out with a conclusive report” on the cause of Woolmer’s death, a senior Interior Ministry official told reporters.
A Pakistani terror suspect extradited from South Africa and held for 18 months in Islamabad without charge has been detained for alleged links to the 2005 London suicide attacks, his lawyer said on Wednesday. Khalid Mehmood Rashid (25) appeared before a federal review board at the Supreme Court in Islamabad for the first time last week and his detention was extended by three months.
Pakistani security forces captured one of the Taliban’s three most senior leaders just hours after United States Vice-President Dick Cheney’s unannounced visit to Pakistan earlier this week. The capture of Mullah Obaidullah Akhund marked the first Pakistan arrest of a senior leader of the Islamist militia since it was driven from power in Afghanistan in 2001.
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/ 23 February 2007
Pakistan successfully test-fired a nuclear-capable, surface-to-surface ballistic missile with a range of 2 000km on Friday, the military said. The test was witnessed by the chairperson of the joint chiefs of staff committee, General Ehsan ul Haq, who described it as an important milestone in Pakistan’s quest to sustain strategic balance in South Asia.
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/ 16 January 2007
A Pakistan army air strike on a militant camp near the Afghan border on Tuesday killed up to 20 fighters in a tribal area regarded as a hotbed of support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, according to intelligence officials. ”The operation was carried out at 6.55am [local time] in Zamzola in South Waziristan,” said Major General Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s military spokesperson.
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/ 10 January 2007
India’s new Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee is expected in Pakistan on Saturday for talks that are likely to show that a three-year-old peace process is on track. It is more than 15 months since the last visit by an Indian foreign minister to Islamabad, and while Mukherjee was only appointed in October, the Pakistani leadership know him well from his previous job as defence minister.
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/ 17 November 2006
A British man who spent 18 years in a Pakistani jail for a murder he says he didn’t commit, was released on Friday, the Pakistani interior minister said. President Pervez Musharraf commuted Mirza Tahir Hussain’s death sentence on Wednesday after the British government and rights groups had pleaded for clemency for the 36-year-old from Leeds.
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/ 16 November 2006
Pakistan on Thursday test-fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile, the military said, a day after agreeing to fresh atomic safety measures at talks with rival India. The Hatf V missile with a range of 1Â 300km was fired from an undisclosed location and the test was successful, it said.
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/ 15 November 2006
Pakistan’s lower house of Parliament voted on Wednesday to put the crime of rape under the civil penal code, curtailing the scope of Islamic laws that rights groups have long criticised as unfair to women. The Women’s Protection Bill was seen as a barometer of President Pervez Musharraf’s commitment to his vision of ”enlightened moderation”.
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/ 13 November 2006
Five years ago today the Taliban vanished from Kabul and a liberated city exploded with joy. As the turbaned Islamists scurried, whooping residents rushed on to the streets. Men queued to have their beards shaved, some women removed their burkas and Radio Kabul played music for the first time in years.
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/ 4 November 2006
Threats of bloody retribution and accusations of American involvement erupted across Pakistan’s tribal areas this week after the missile strike that killed 80 people in a radical madrasa. About 20Â 000 tribesmen crowded into Khar, about 10km from the school, which was shredded by air strikes on Monday. Cries of ”Down with America” rang out as radical clerics addressed the turbaned protesters, many of whom brandished Kalashnikovs or rocket launchers.
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/ 31 October 2006
A religious school targeted in Pakistan air strikes was frequented by top al-Qaeda militants, including Ayman al-Zawahiri and the alleged mastermind of the foiled London airlines attack, a senior security official said on Tuesday. Neither al-Zawahiri — Osama bin Laden’s Egyptian deputy — nor Abu Obaida al-Misri were in the school, or madrasa, at the time of the raid on Monday, the official said.
Former Pakistan fast bowler Sarfraz Nawaz said on Tuesday he was able to detect ball-tampering from 1 000 metres away and offered cricket chiefs his services to stop the practice. Nawaz, hailed as the pioneer of reverse swinging the ball during his heyday in the early 1970s and 1980s, said tampering was out of control in the modern game and called on world cricket chiefs to act.
Flash floods triggered by torrential rains have killed at least 120 people in Pakistan’s North West Frontier province, and forced hundreds of thousands out of their homes in neighbouring India, officials said on Monday. In the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, 100 people have died in four days of torrential monsoon rains.