ISLAMABAD, 14 July 2007 — Protests were staged in all major cities of Pakistan yesterday over the government’s assault on the Red Mosque in Islamabad that left more than 100 dead as security was tightened to foil possible revenge attacks.
More than 1,200 demonstrators shouted slogans denouncing President Gen. Pervez Musharraf after emerging from mosques following Friday prayers in Karachi, the country’s largest city.
“Musharraf is going an extra mile to implement the agenda of America in this part of the world,” a religious leader, Syed Munawwar Hasan, told the crowd.
Smaller rallies were held in Rawalpindi, Lahore, Peshawar, Islamabad and elsewhere a day after a six-member coalition of religious parties endorsed a call by 13,000 madrasas for a nationwide protest against the attack on the mosque.
Al-Qaeda and the Taleban have urged attacks, including suicide bombings, against government targets. The brother of a cleric killed in the eight-day mosque siege called for an “Islamic revolution.” Two suicide attacks were reported Thursday, a day after the siege ended in a hail of bullets and explosions that wiped out well-armed militants inside the sprawling mosque compound.
Police yesterday raided a house in the northwestern town of Dera Ismail Khan and arrested three would-be suicide bombers who were preparing for attacks, said police official Niaz Qureshi. Qureshi said five suicide vests were seized.
Violence across northwestern Pakistan, a hotbed of extremism, has killed at least 35 people since the fighting at the mosque began last week, prompting the army to send troops to at least four parts of the region to contain the backlash.
About 3,000 troops were deployed to the town of Tank and others to Swat, according to intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity since they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Pakistan has already stationed about 90,000 troops in the region to flush out foreign militants and their local backers. Musharraf, speaking on nationwide television Thursday night, said he was determined to eradicate extremism in Pakistan — focusing on the northwest along the Afghan border, which the US says is increasingly a haven for Al-Qaeda and other terrorists. “Extremism and terrorism will be defeated in every corner of the country,” Musharraf said. He said that madrasas will not be tolerated if they inculcate violence among students, like some under the Red Mosque’s umbrella did.
Tariq Azim, the deputy information minister, told the Associated Press that the government has taken “appropriate steps to safeguard the lives and property of common people, and to ensure that no one damages public property.” Security forces were on “high alert” in Quetta, a city near the Afghan border, police chief Rehmat Ullah Niazi said.
In Karachi, senior police official Azhar Faruqi said police were deployed outside mosques and other buildings.
There has not yet been a mass popular protest over the Red Mosque siege, indicating that the crackdown has raised Musharraf’s standing among moderate Pakistanis worried about extremism in their nation.
The assault, however, has given hard-liners a new rallying cry and sparked calls for revenge attacks.
“God willing, Pakistan will have an Islamic revolution soon,” said the Red Mosque’s chief cleric Maulana Abdul Aziz at the funeral of his brother, cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who was killed during a last-ditch defense of the mosque.
Aziz, who was arrested last week while trying to slip out of the mosque disguised as a woman, was allowed by authorities to attend the Thursday funeral in Ghazi’s ancestral village in Punjab province. Yesterday, the Supreme Court ordered the government to release by Monday all persons arrested at the Red Mosque if they were not involved in major crimes.
Deputy Attorney General Tariq Khokhar said that 632 people, including Aziz’s wife and two daughters, were arrested during the operation. Some 386 people have already been released.
Khokhar, quoting an official government report, said 102 people died in the Red Mosque violence, including 91 civilians and 11 military personnel. He said 248 were injured, including 204 civilians and 44 military.
Some opposition figures claim the death toll was higher, but none has offered any evidence. Qazi Hussain Ahmed, president of the six-party opposition United Action Forum, charged at a news conference that 400 to 1,000 people were killed.
