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‘No more militants in Lal Masjid’

Nirupama Subramanian

Ghazi’s body flown to native village; dispute over burial place

ISLAMABAD: There are no more militants inside the Lal Masjid, the Pakistan military said late on Wednesday, but troops inside are now engaged in “cleaning and combing” operation.

But nearly 40 hours after the operation began, a clear picture is yet to emerge about the number of people killed inside the sprawling premises of the mosque-madrasa complex, and whether they were all militants or if some were hostages.

Military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad said the first phase of the operation to clear out militants had ended.

Until late in the afternoon, commandos of the Special Services Group in charge of the operation were flushing out the last remaining militants holed up in the mosque.

Gunfire and explosions were heard intermittently. The spokesman said the remaining few militants had offered resistance resulting in injuries to some troops in the morning.

Earlier in the day the spokesman said the Special Services Group had cleared the sprawling complex of most of the militants, and was “sanitising” the area of unexploded munitions such as mines and grenades.

As a result, the military put off a planned media visit to the mosque until Thursday.

The Government flew the body of Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the militant cleric killed in Tuesday’s operation, to his village in Rojhan Mazari in southern Punjab as a dispute erupted over where to bury him.

His elder brother Abdul Aziz, who was arrested as he tried to flee the mosque in a burqa, accompanied the body.

But his two sisters petitioned the Supreme Court, asking to be given the body so that he could be buried next to their father in the capital’s Jamia Fareedia, the men’s seminary affiliated to the Lal Masjid.

A two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court then ordered a temporary burial of the body until the dispute could be resolved.

The casualty numbers given by the military on Wednesday changed only slightly from Tuesday’s numbers — more than 50 killed in the mosque, 10 security personnel killed, including the officer who died on Sunday, and 33 troops wounded.

The troops were picking up bodies as they went, but Major General Arshad said he would be able to give an exact count of the numbers killed only when the process was complete.

There is no clarity yet on whether those killed inside were all militants or if they included “civilians” who, the Government said, were being held hostage by “a few hardcore militants.”

The absence of information about the numbers has fuelled suspicion about the extent of casualties, with rumour-mongers having a field day.

The military spokesman said that on the basis of information provided by those who had given themselves up in the early days of the stand-off, the Army had visualised that “all told,” between 150 and 250 people were inside the mosque. As the operation was underway, 86 people gave themselves up or were arrested.

Aside from the 27 women and three children who were “rescued” from a basement of the Jamia Hafsa, Major General Arshad said he could not say yet if there were other women or children in the compound at the time of the operation.

He said 164 commandos were involved in the operation, while soldiers, police and the Rangers manned two cordons around the mosque.

Parliamentarians of the hardline religious coalition Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) held a demonstration near the National Assembly buildings on Wednesday to protest against the storming of the Lal Masjid, and the party’s supporters rallied in Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province shouting slogans against President Pervez Musharraf.

The MMA, which rules the NWFP, also announced a three-day mourning for those who were killed in the operation.

The Peshawar rally demanded that the army leave the mosque immediately and hand over the premises to the Wakaful Madaris which governs all madrassas in the country.

But on the whole Pakistan remained calm, although the entire country remained on high alert for a possible extremist backlash.

Benazir Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan people’s Party, came out in support of the action, saying President Musharraf had taken the “right decision.”Religious Affairs Minister Eijaz Ul-Haq said on Tuesday that Lal Masjid had become a “hub” and a “transit point” for “all types of terrorists.”

The military spokesman said on Wednesday that security forces had not yet been able to ascertain if foreign extremists were present inside the Lal Masjid at the time of the storming.

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