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ISLAMABAD - Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf Saturday told Islamists besieged at a mosque in the capital to surrender or be killed, amid claims that a bid to shoot down his plane was in revenge for the standoff.
Military ruler Musharraf said that the hardline students holed up inside the fortified Red Mosque complex in Islamabad for the past five days must immediately free women and children allegedly being held as human shields.
"I request these people to come out and surrender and I say this here, that they will be killed if they do not surrender," Musharraf, wearing his army uniform, told reporters in his first public comment on the confrontation.
"There are women and children in the mosque and we have been careful only to avoid any loss."
Pakistani forces have held back from raiding the now bullet-pocked mosque but there were intense clashes again during the day.
Security forces late Saturday blew up part of the compound wall and there was also an intense exchange of fire with Islamists holed up inside, a security official said.
"Security forces dynamited the wall to allow people inside to come out if they want to," he told AFP.
Those inside the compound who wished to leave risked being shot by hardline students if they attempted to climb the wall, which is seven to eight feet (2.1 to 2.4 metres) high, he said.
Breaching the wall also gave security forces a clearer picture of what was happening, he added.
The firebrand cleric leading the resistance, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, said Pakistani forces had killed 30 female and 40 male students in the siege. The women were buried at the site, he said.
The government says the toll is 19, including a soldier and several civilians.
The cleric said he and his followers had enough rations, arms and ammunition inside the compound to "fight for another 25 to 30 days and we will do that, God willing."
Ghazi, 43, also signalled his defiance by saying that he was telephoned by a man who claimed to have shot at Musharraf's aircraft on Friday in revenge for the siege.
"I received a telephone call yesterday from a man I did not know," who offered his "congratulations" before news of the attack on the president became public, Ghazi told AFP by telephone from the mosque.
"He said, 'I fired at Musharraf's plane just a while ago.' He said that Musharraf survived," said Ghazi, the deputy leader of the mosque.
Security officials said earlier they were probing possible links between the mosque operation and the failed bid to shoot down the president's plane as it took off from Chaklala military airbase at Rawalpindi, near Islamabad.
Police have said they found two anti-aircraft guns and a machine gun on the roof of a house near the airbase after the attack.
Musharraf, a key US ally who grabbed power in a 1999 coup, has survived at least three other militant attempts to kill him.
A group of Islamist lawmakers said troops stopped them from entering the mosque to negotiate with Ghazi, whose brother, mosque leader Abdul Aziz, was captured by police on Wednesday while trying to flee dressed in a woman's burqa.
"We have been prevented because the forces of Musharraf are hell-bent on spilling the blood of women and children," said hardline member of parliament Maulana Shah Abdul Aziz, the leader of the delegation.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz blamed the militants for the standoff and accused them of holding hostages. Ghazi denies the hostage charge.
"All children and women who are being held hostage should be freed forthwith," he told state television. "Their parents are waiting for them outside and desperately want these children to be released."
In a blow to the mosque's defiance, police in a pre-dawn swoop seized control of a separate radical madrassa affiliated to it, the Jamia Faridia religious school, without a shot being fired, officials said.
Police said the Jamia Faridia was the "powerhouse" for the Red Mosque and that several students were involved in the current violence. Dozens of students were arrested.
Students from the mosque and the madrassa had irked the government since January with a Taliban-style anti-vice campaign, which involved the abduction of several people they linked to prostitution, including seven Chinese.
Musharraf's tough stance has boosted his popularity after months of being embroiled in a crisis over his suspension of Pakistan's chief justice.
- AFP /ls
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