Pakistanis protest assault on mosque

herald tribune

ISLAMABAD: Protests were held in all major Pakistani cities Friday over a government assault that left more than 100 people dead at a mosque in the capital as security was tightened to foil possible revenge attacks, officials said.

More than 1,200 demonstrators chanted slogans denouncing the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, a key ally in the U.S. campaign against terrorism, after emerging from mosques following afternoon prayers in Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan.

"Musharraf is going an extra mile to implement the agenda of America in this part of the world," Syed Munawwar Hasan, a prominent religious leader, 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 religious schools for a nationwide protest against the attack on the Red Mosque in Islamabad.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan 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.

Violence across northwestern Pakistan, a hotbed of Islamic extremism, has killed at least 35 people since the fighting at the mosque began last week, prompting the Pakistani Army to send troops to at least four parts of the region to contain the backlash.

Musharraf, speaking on nationwide television Thursday, said he was resolved to eradicate extremism in Pakistan - focusing on the northwest along the Afghan border, which the United States 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, or religious schools, will not be tolerated if they inculcate violence among students, as he said was the case at the Red Mosque.

There has not yet been a mass popular protest over the Red Mosque siege, suggesting 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," Maulana Abdul Aziz, the Red Mosque's chief cleric, said at the funeral of his brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, a cleric who was killed during the last-ditch defense of the mosque, whose radical clerics had led a vigilante anti-vice campaign in the capital that had become increasingly violent

On Friday, the Pakistani Supreme Court ordered the government to release by Monday people 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, while 386 people have already been released.

Khokhar, quoting an official government report, said 102 people died in the Red Mosque