Clashes at Pakistan mosque leave 9 dead
(AP)Updated: 2007-07-04 00:20 Security forces clashed with militants Tuesday outside a radical mosque where students have carried out a string of kidnappings of police officers and alleged prostitutes, killing at least nine people, a senior official said.
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The battle marked a major escalation in a standoff at the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, whose clerics have challenged the military-led government by mounting a vigilante anti-vice campaign in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad for the past several months.
Deputy Interior Minister Zafar Warriach said the dead included four students, three civilians, one soldier and a journalist. However, clerics at the mosque claimed that 10 of their supporters had died, according to a lawmaker sent to mediate the dispute.
The minister said 148 were injured, most of them by tear gas fired by security forces.
By nightfall, the city's top security official, Khalid Pervez, said a cease-fire had been reached with the militants. But Warriach said the government was "considering all options" when asked what steps would be taken to defuse the standoff with the students.
The trouble began when student followers of the mosque, including young men with guns and dozens of women wearing black burqas, rushed toward a nearby police checkpoint. Police and paramilitary soldiers fired tear gas and, as the students retreated, an Associated Press photographer saw at least four students, some of them masked, fire shots toward security forces.
Gunfire was also heard from the police position.
A man used the mosque's loudspeakers to order suicide bombers to get into position. "They have attacked our mosque, the time for sacrifice has come," the speaker said.
The students later pelted two government buildings, including the Ministry of Environment, with rocks and set them ablaze, and torched a dozen cars in the ministry's lot.
Warriach said about 120 people from the mosques had tried to occupy a nearby government building and security forces reacted to control the situation.
Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the mosque's deputy leader, said the security forces sparked the battle by erecting barricades near the mosque. "The government is to be blamed for it," he said.
Hours after the clashes, dozens of students were patrolling the area around the mosque, some carrying gas masks, gasoline-filled bottles and Molotov cocktails. About a dozen were armed with guns, including AK-47 assault rifles.
Security forces cordoned off the area with barbed wire and checkpoints and continued to fire tear gas at demonstrators from a distance. Shops in the area were shuttered.
Authorities have been at loggerheads with the mosque for months over a land dispute and after its followers began a campaign to impose a Taliban-style version of Islamic law in the capital.
Earlier this year, clerics from the mosque sent female seminary students to occupy a municipal children's library. They raised the stakes further by kidnapping a Pakistani woman they accused of running a brothel and holding her for three days.
Last month, they briefly seized seven policemen to press for the release of students detained by authorities for threatening the owners of music stores. In late June, the students kidnapped nine people — including several Chinese nationals — from a massage parlor for several hours.
Abdul Rashid Ghazi, one of two brothers who run the mosque, said the abductees were "spreading obscenity" and "running a brothel in the cover of a massage parlor."
President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said last week that he was ready to raid the mosque, but warned that suicide bombers from a militant group linked to al-Qaida had slipped into the facility.
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