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Cleric forms parallel court

Nirupama Subramanian

Threatens Pakistani Government with suicide attacks

UP IN SMOKE: DVDs, video cassettes and video players being set afire in Islamabad on Friday.

ISLAMABAD: Threatening jihad and suicide attacks unless Islamic law was implemented, pro-Taliban Islamist clerics and madrasa students strengthened their foothold in Pakistan's capital on Friday with a bonfire of video-cassettes, CDs and DVDs in the heart of the city.

The prayer leader of the capital's controversial Lal Masjid, who is spearheading the campaign, also announced the setting up of a Sharia court in the mosque.

The bonfire was part of a "clean-up" that clerics in Lal Masjid, a radical Islamist mosque, and its affiliated madrasas, say they have undertaken to rid Pakistan of "anti-Islamic" elements.

Hundreds of students from the madrasas gathered around the heaped cassettes to witness the bonfire. When the owner of the video store set the match to the heaped up cassettes and video recorders, cries of "Allah-o-Akbar" and "Al Jihad, Al Jihad" went up.

The mosque administrators said the storeowner volunteered to burn his tapes as he had realised that he was in an "anti-Islamic" business.

Lathi-wielding boys from the affiliated Jamia Fareedia seminary blocked off the entire road outside the mosque, patrolling it from the early hours of the morning.

No police were present near the mosque, a stone's throw from the National Assembly, the President's House, the Supreme Court and the Diplomatic Enclave.

The burning of the video cassettes comes a week after students of Jamia Hafsa, the women's seminary also run by the mosque, kidnapped three women accusing them of running a brothel in the neighbourhood and imprisoned them until they "confessed" to their sins. In addition, they held two policemen hostage for a day, setting them free only after two seminary teachers arrested for their suspected involvement in the kidnap were let off.

Addressing a vast congregation at the noon prayers in the Lal Masjid, prayer leader Abdul Aziz Ghazi said it was not the Lal Masjid but the Government that had set up "a state within a state" by not implementing Shari'a or Islamic rule in a world ruled by Allah.

He announced the appointment of 10 "qazis" or religious leaders to a Sharia court at the Lal Masjid, and said the setting up of an "Islamic nizam" would begin from the mosque.

He gave a one-month deadline to the Government to implement the Shari'a, after which the "taleba" or the students of the Jamia Hafsa and Jamia Fareedia would take the matter into their hands. Reacting to a Government statement that it was prepared to carry out an "operation" against the mosque as a "last option", Mr. Ghazi said the seminary students also had a last option, that of carrying out "fidayeen attacks".

Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao said at a press conference later the Government would proceed against Mr. Ghazi according to the law. "Several options" were open to the Government, he said.

The Minister said Pakistan already had a Shariat Court, and no individual could set up a court in the name of Islam or enforce Shariat.

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