PAKISTAN: Cleric in besieged Pakistan mosque offers surrender, fears children used as shields

Residents living in the vicinity of Islamabad's radical RedMosque rush to buy provisions as curfew in the locality is relaxed for a couple of hours. A Pakistani cleric holed up in a mosque in Islamabad said on Thursday (July 5) he and his student followers were willing to surrender, raising hopes of an end to a confrontation in which 19 people have died. Abdul Rashid Ghazi was speaking in a telephone interview broadcast on Geo Television as security forces surrounded the Red Mosque, where he and hundreds of followers had held off a siege since Tuesday (July 3). The cleric, whose elder brother was arrested on Wednesday (July 4) night trying to escape wearing a woman's all-enveloping burqa, said his followers should be let go if authorities could not prove they belonged to any banned militant groups, or were not wanted for any crime. Violence erupted outside the mosque on Tuesday after a months-long stand-off between the authorities and the clerics and their followers. Deputy Information Minister Tariq Azim Khan told a news conference that, based on reports from some of the students who had quit the mosque, the militants appeared to be using women and children as human shields. The official death toll from the three days of violence in the Pakistani capital rose to at least 19. Earlier in the day, a local broadcaster ARY TV showed pictures of helicopters hovering above Islamabad and soldiers jumping through a breached boundary wall of the Red mosque. It also showed some of the students who'd surrendered with soldiers sitting in a truck. Fears mounted that women and children were being used as human shields at the mosque. On Thursday the curfew which has been imposed in the neighbourhood around the mosque was relaxed for a couple of hours. Local residents used the opportunity to rush out and buy provisions in the shops. One restaurant owner, Malik Naeem, was criticial of the authorities saying the curfew area is too large and could be restricted to the immediate vicinity of the mosque. He says his customers are too scared to venture out. Hundreds of police and soldiers, backed by armoured personnel carriers, have orders to shoot armed resisters on sight. The Lal Masjid movement is part of a phenomenon known as "Talibanisation" -- the spread of militant influence from remote tribal regions on the Afghan border into central areas. The government estimates there are 50 to 60 hard-core militants among them, armed with automatic weapons, grenades and petrol bombs.

ITN Source | July 6, 2007

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