Pakistani tribals vow revenge over madrasa strike

KHAR, Pakistan, Nov 3 (Reuters) Thousands of Pakistani tribesmen protested today, vowing vengeance for an army airstrike on an al-Qaeda-linked religious school that killed around 80 suspected militants four days earlier.

Effigies of US President George W Bush and Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf were paraded on mules through Khar, the main town in the Bajaur tribal region bordering Afghanistan, beaten with sticks and shoes and then burnt.

Several thousand tribesmen gathered in Khar, just 10 km from the destroyed madrasa, called Zia-ul-Koran or Light of the Koran in the village of Chenagai. The pro-Taliban cleric who ran it was killed in the raid.

''The people of the tribal areas are being treated like terrorists and innocent people are being killed by the US and Pakistan army. We will not tolerate this any more,'' Waheed Gul, a local leader of the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islaami party, told protesters.

''we will certainly take revenge on these people,'' said another speaker, Zahir Shah.

At Nawagai, another town in Bajaur, tribesmen pelted government buildings with stones and burnt tribal police checkposts.

Along with North and South Waziristan, Bajaur is regarded as a hotbed of support for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

US BLAMED Islamist leaders and tribesmen say the airstrike was really carried out by a U.S. Predator drone aircraft, an allegation that both Pakistan and the United States have denied.

A CIA-operated drone aircraft carried out an attack last January in Bajaur that killed around 18 people, possibly including some al Qaeda operatives. But the main target of the attack, al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al Zawahri, was not there.

Zawahri had also visited the madrasa at Chenagai in the past, but not recently, and no senior militant figures were killed in the airstrike, Pakistani security officials said.

Musharraf says all those killed in the latest airstrike were militants, and the military released video footage shot from a surveillance aircraft showing rows of men doing physical exercises at the madrasa just an hour before the attack.

Protesters said the dead, mostly young men aged between 15 and 25, were merely students, although Pakistani security sources say they were being trained as suicide bombers to attack NATO, U.S., and Afghan forces across the border.

Protests against the raid took place in many towns of North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Baluchistan, which adjoin Afghanistan.

But, despite holding power in both provinces, Islamist parties failed to muster large-scale support outside the immediate border areas.

Maulana Fazalur Rehman, a leader of the six-member Islamist alliance, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, addressed a rally of around 1,000 people in Peshawar, the provincial capital of NWFP.

''We are telling Bush to withdraw from Afghanistan otherwise it will turn into a grave for him,'' said Rehman, adding a warning to Musharraf against waging war in Pashtun tribal lands.

Some radicals used a protest in the NWFP town of Mansehra to rail against foreign aid agencies for promoting un-Islamic values while carrying out relief work after last year's earthquake.

In Lahore, 8,000 members of Jamaat-u-Dawa, an Islamist charity that the United States says is a terrorist organisation, held prayers for the airstrike's victims.

REUTERS SY KP1925