Pak sends surrender ultimatum to mosque militants

Islamabad, July 4: About 150 women left a besieged mosque inthe Pakistani capital after the government set a deadline for surrendertoday, but many more militant students remained inside, surrounded byhundreds of troops.

Soldiers sealed off the mosque and have imposed a 24-hour curfew after morethan ten people died in clashes yesterday.

The violence erupted after a months-long stand-off between theauthorities and a Taliban-style movement based at Lal Masjid, or RedMosque, less than a couple of kilometres (a mile) from parliament and aprotected enclave for foreign embassies.

Soldiers moved 12 armoured personnel carriers, mounted withmachineguns, into the area as gunfire subsided overnight, and thegovernment set an 11 a m (1130 IST) deadline for students to lay downtheir arms and surrender, but later extended it to 430 IST.

''All women and children would be given complete protection andsafe passage. We hope that male students will surrender,'' Secretary ofInformation Anwar Mehmood told a newsconference.

Soon after the initial deadline passed, Deputy CommissionerChaudhry Mohammad Ali said 150 women had filed out of the mosque'scompound.

Deputy Interior Minister Zafar Warraich told a news conference earlier that anyone who tried to fight would be shot.

''A bullet will be responded with by a bullet,'' he said.

Liberal politicians have pressed President Pervez Musharraf tocrack down on Lal Masjid's clerics and their followers, who havethreatened suicide attacks if force was used against them.

The religious hardliners have confronted authorities for months,running a vigilante anti-vice campaign and campaigning for observanceof strict Islamic law.

Authorities had not used force for fear it could provoke attacksor lead to casualties among female students at a religious school, ormadrasa, in the mosque compound.

Overnight, power was cut off to the compound and surrounding neighbourhood and barbed wire laid across junctions.

''The army is turning back anyone who tries to leave their street,and there is no traffic on the roads,'' said Reuters correspondentMatiullah Jan, a resident in the curfew zone.

The Interior Ministry said nine people had been killed, but Islamabad hospital officials later said the toll was morethan ten.

About 150 people were taken to hospital, 30 with bullet wounds, others suffering from the effects of tear gas.

A soldier and at least four students were among the dead, as well as a television cameraman and people caught in crossfire.

Clerics acting as intermediaries had held talks with leaders ofthe student movement and the government overnight, but there was nosign of a break in the deadlock.

''The talks appear to be heading nowhere,'' Abdul Rashid Ghazi,deputy leader of the students, said by telephone from the mosque.

One of the young women in the mosque's compound was defiant.

''We're nervous but not scared,'' the madrasa student, Mahira,said by telephone. ''Nobody wants to leave. Your faith gets stronger ina situation like this.'' She said thousands of people were in thecompound. Many women students clad in black, all-enveloping burqas wereseen leaving yesterday and anxious parents turned up to take childrenhome.

There are 5,000 or so students affiliated with the mosque, and they range in age from teenagers to people in their 30s.

Reuters

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