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ISLAMABAD : Hundreds of militant students holed up in a pro-Taliban mosque in Islamabad surrendered Wednesday as troops in armoured vehicles besieged the building, a day after clashes there left 16 people dead.
Authorities announced an 11 am (0600 GMT) deadline for the leaders of the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, to give themselves up or face action, but extended it for another 90 minutes while religious leaders tried to thrash out a deal.
Soldiers continued to enforce a shoot-on-sight curfew around the mosque in the heart of the leafy capital, and killed a male student and an apparently mentally ill man in the early hours of the day.
Male students fought gunbattles with security forces on Tuesday in a bloody climax to the mosque's six months of defiance against President Pervez Musharraf, including the abduction last month of seven Chinese nationals.
"So far 250 men and 100 women have come out and they are being looked after. A large stream of people continues to come out," Information Secretary Anwar Mehmood told AFP.
"President Musharraf has announced 5000 rupees (83 dollars) in allowances for each person leaving voluntarily."
Several hundred are believed to remain inside.
The mosque says it has around 5,000 male and 4,000 female students, ranging in ages from early teens to mid 20s. Most are from conservative northwestern Pakistan and tribal regions.
The government has said that some militants from banned groups may also be sheltering there.
Troops meanwhile arranged a bus to transport people who had gathered at a nearby market and let them pick up female relatives studying at a school attached to the mosque.
"We have been waiting here since daybreak, begging the security forces to let us get back our girls," said Naeem Baig, who waited as his brother fetched his niece.
Armoured personnel carriers massed outside the mosque and on street corners up to a mile (a kilometre and a half) away, including outside the AFP bureau.
Hundreds of troops also built sandbag bunkers and rolled out barbed wire to block off all roads. Electricity to the area immediately around the complex was cut during the night.
Abdul Rashid Ghazi, one of two brothers who leads the mosque, offered a conditional surrender -- but said he still insisted on the imposition of Islamic law in the nation.
The mosque's stated goal is to turn Pakistan into an Islamic state like the one installed by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which lasted from 1996 until the US-led invasion in 2001.
It has led a freelance anti-vice campaign in the capital including the abduction of several people accused of running brothels -- including the seven Chinese -- and raids on local music and DVD shops.
"We are ready to set aside arms if we have written guarantees that they will not attack or launch an operation. They say we should not talk about Islamic law -- we have our reservations about that," Ghazi told a private television channel.
He said the mosque had held talks with a hardline pro-Taliban opposition leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, in a bid to end the stand-off but had not spoken to the government.
Ghazi added the mosque had enough supplies to carry on "until God wants."
A spokesman for Rehman said he was supposed to leave for London for a conference of opposition parties but had cancelled his flight to aid in negotiations.
Tuesday's shootings left a soldier, a journalist, at least eight students and some bystanders dead. More than 140 people were wounded, many of them female students suffering from tear gas inhalation.
Military ruler Musharraf -- already facing a crisis over his suspension of Pakistan's top judge -- has faced mounting criticism over his failure to crack down on the mosque.
He said last week that suicide bombers from an Al-Qaeda-linked militant group were sheltering in it.
But he has held off largely for fear of causing casualties among the thousands of students -- especially the women, who mostly hail from Taliban-sympathising areas along the Afghan border.
Five Pakistani soldiers were killed in a suicide car bombing early Wednesday in a troubled tribal frontier region in what officials said was a possible revenge attack.
The Red Mosque students took over a government-run children's library in January.
In April it set up an Islamic court that imposed a "fatwa" on the then-tourism minister after she was pictured hugging a foreign parachuting instructor.
- AFP /ls
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