Cleric captured in a Burqa as 1,000 surrender at mosque
The chief cleric of a radical mosque in Islamabad was arrested and more than 1,000 of his followers surrendered today as troops backed by armoured vehicles and helicopters tightened their siege of the complex, officials said.
Female police officers searching women fleeing the mosque’s seminary discovered Maulana Abdul Aziz under a black head-to-toe veil, said Khalid Pervez, the city’s top administrator.
An AP Television News cameraman saw plainclothes police bundling the grey-bearded cleric into the back of a car which sped away.
“They have no options but to surrender,” said Javed Iqbal Cheema, a Pakistan government spokesman. “The government is not into dialogue with these clerics.”
As evening fell, sporadic gunfire erupted around the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, and at an adjacent women’s seminary while three helicopter gunships circled overhead.
Scores of police and soldiers, some armed with sniper rifles, watched as male and female seminary students filed out of the compounds. A number of the women were in tears.
The city’s deputy administrator, Chaudhry Mohammed Ali, said more than 1,000 had surrendered.
“They can be a few hundred, they can be more than that,” Minister of Information Mohammed Ali Durrani told reporters about the estimated number remaining inside the complex. It was unclear how many of those were hardened militants.
One of those who decided to give up, 15-year-old Maryam Qayyeum, said many had decided to stay in the seminary.
“They are happy. They only want martyrdom. They don’t want to go home,” she said.
The government said all women and children would be granted amnesty but males involved in killings and other crimes as well as the mosque’s clerics would face legal action.
The mosque’s deputy leader Abdul Rashid Ghazi said earlier he was prepared to talk with the government but added, “We will continue to defend ourselves.”
Qayyeum said mosque leaders were not trying to stop students from giving up. But her mother, who had come to take her home said, “They are making speeches. They want to incite them.”
The events came after a day of bloody clashes at the mosque on Tuesday between security forces and armed militants holed up in the sprawling mosque, which has been at loggerheads with the government for months.
The bloodshed added to a sense of crisis in Pakistan, where President Gen. Pervez Musharraf already faces emboldened militants near the Afghan border and a pro-democracy movement triggered by his botched attempt to fire the country’s chief justice.
The mosque siege sparked street protests Tuesday in the cities of Lahore and Quetta organised by radical religious parties.
Elsewhere, officials said a suicide car bomber rammed a vehicle into a Pakistan army convoy near the Afghan border, killing five soldiers and five civilians.
Unidentified assailants fired a rocket at a police station in north-western Pakistan, killing one officer and wounding four police. Also in the north-west, an explosive killed four people and injured two district officials.
It was not clear if today’s incidents were linked to the mosque crisis.
A senior government spokesman, Anwar Mahmood, said the number killed in Islamabad had risen to 16, but declined to give a breakdown of the victims. Earlier, the government said they included militants, innocent bystanders, a journalist and members of the security forces.
Ghazi told the AP that 20 of his students had been killed by security forces, including two young men as they were climbing to the top of the mosque for morning prayers Wednesday. He said sniper fire was being directed at the compounds.
The government has imposed a curfew on the area around the mosque.
The violence dramatically deepened a six-month stand-off at the fortress-like mosque, whose clerics have challenged the government by sending students from the mosque’s madrassas to kidnap alleged prostitutes and police in a Taliban-style anti-vice campaign.
Some accuse intelligence agencies of encouraging the crisis to justify prolonging military rule – a conspiracy theory with considerable traction in Pakistan’s intrigue-ridden politics.
Plans for Musharraf, a close US ally who seized power in a 1999 coup, to ask MPs for a new five-year term this fall are in doubt because of rising opposition.
Yet the general’s failure to crack down on the clerics has dented his credentials as a bulwark against extremism – diminishing his worth to Washington, his key international backer.
