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Pakistan Mosque Clashes Leave Five Dead NewsMax.com Wires ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- 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 five people, officials said. 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. 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.
Story Continues Below 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. Doctors at two hospitals said the death toll included two policemen, one soldier, a militant and a laborer. Hours after the clashes, dozens of students were patrolling the area around the mosque, and sporadic shots were still heard. Security forces, some riding in armored vehicles, 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. Deputy Interior Minister Zafar Warriach said officials were in touch with the mosque administration to try to defuse the situation. "Despite provocation from the Lal Masjid, we are not using force," Warriach said on state-run Pakistan Television. (AP) An armed Pakistani religious students guard female students as police opened fire outside the Red... Full Image However, Warriach said it was the duty of the government to protect the life and property of its citizens, and "we will do it." Some of the students carried gas masks and several were seen with gasoline-filled bottles and Molotov cocktails. About a dozen were armed with guns, including AK-47 assault rifles. 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. Doctors at various hospitals said they had admitted about 100 people with injuries. Most were suffering from the effects of tear gas, but they also included several students - both male and female - with bullet wounds, the medics said. Witnesses said a reporter and cameraman were caught in the crossfire and taken to a hospital with bullet wounds.
At loggerheads with authorities over a land dispute, clerics from the mosque in January 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 in what they said was an attempt to impose a harsh interpretation of Islamic law, or Shariah. Last month, they seized seven policemen to press for the release of students detained by authorities for threatening the owners of music stores. The officers were released after authorities brought thousands of police into the capital. In late June, the students briefly kidnapped nine people - including several Chinese nationals - from a massage parlor in an upscale neighborhood in the capital. 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.
© 2007 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
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