Pakistan buries mosque dead

Pakistan is burying its dead after a bloody week-long siege at the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad.Grieving relatives and villagers attended the funeral of rebel cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi, but almost 70 of his followers killed with him when troops stormed the mosque were buried without ceremony in unmarked graves.The burials took place a day after President Pervez Musharraf ordered commandos to kill the last few gunmen hiding in the ruins of the mosque complex.Anger at the government's action ran deep in tribal parts of northwest Pakistan, although sentiment in most of the country sided with Mr Musharraf's decision to send in the army.Journalists were shown a blackened room in the mosque's religious school where an army spokesman said a suicide bomber died along with a half-dozen victims whose bodies were so badly burned it was impossible to tell their age or gender.Ghazi was killed on Tuesday along with a handful of hardcore militants he had gathered around him in his drive to impose strict Islamic rule on the capital.His elder brother Abdul Aziz, caught fleeing disguised as a woman in the early stages of the siege, led the prayers before Ghazi's body was buried at their ancestral village in the eastern province of Punjab.Mourners smashed the coffin's glass lid and tore a white cloth from the corpse's face to see if it was really that of the 43-year-old cleric.There were chants of "al Jihad, al Jihad" as prayers were read for Ghazi.In an internet video, al-Qaeda's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri called for revenge, stoking fears of a violent backlash from militants exporting the Taliban's hardline version of Islam from the tribal badlands to Pakistani cities."If you do not retaliate ... Musharraf will not spare you," said Zawahri, believed to be hiding on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.US intelligence officials warned officials in Washington overnight that al-Qaeda had regrouped in the region.© Independent Television News Limited 2007. All rights reserved.

ITN | July 12, 2007

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