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Surrender or face death, says Musharraf

Nirupama Subramanian

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf on Saturday asked the cleric of the capital’s Lal Masjid and the militant students holed up inside the mosque to surrender unconditionally or face death.

But he did not give any deadline for the surrender, giving the impression that the Government is no hurry and still hopes to pressure those inside to come out without using force.

In his first public comments about the five-day stand-off between the militants and security forces at the mosque that has claimed at least 19 lives, Gen. Musharraf said the militants had brought a bad name to both Islam and Pakistan.

“They must surrender, or they will be killed,” he said, adding that the Government had exercised great restraint in handling the situation because of the presence of women and children inside.

“We have the power and resources to deal with them. I request them to surrender unconditionally,” he said.

He was speaking near Turbat in Balochistan where he has gone to inspect flood-affected areas.

The official death toll in the stand-off is 19, but Adbul Rashid Ghazi, the defiant cleric who is leading the militant students, told local television over telephone that 70 students had been killed.

He said 30 of them were women, and they had been buried on the mosque premises. Journalists, who have had no access to the area around the mosque from the day after the confrontation began, were pushed back further this morning by security forces, and have no means of independently verifying the situation on the ground.

On the fifth day of the stand-off, gunfire and heavy explosions could be heard from the mosque and television channels were reporting that the walls around Lal Masjid had been demolished.

Both the Army and paramilitaries are involved in the crackdown on the masjid. A curfew still remains in place in the entire residential and commercial sector around the mosque.

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