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ISLAMABAD : Islamic militants from a group linked to Al-Qaeda and to the murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl are believed to be leading hold-outs at a Pakistani mosque, security officials said Sunday.
At least two commanders from the banned group Harkatul-Jihad-e-Islami, whose name means Movement of Islamic Holy War, are inside the besieged Red Mosque in Islamabad, the officials said on condition of anonymity.
"We believe there are militants from Harkatul-Jihad-e-Islami, which was involved in the Pearl murder. Based on intelligence we suspect that two commanders from the group are in there," one senior official told AFP.
"They have taken control and they are putting up fierce resistance."
The information was based on "intercepts" and other intelligence, the officials said, without naming the men.
But the militants are thought to be giving orders to the hundreds of radical students in the mosque, they said.
The government says women and children are being held as human shields, which the mosque's clerics deny.
"Our forces are holding back as long as it is possible to avoid the deaths of women and children," the security official said.
Harkatul-Jihad-e-Islami, which was formed in the 1980s, was the main Pakistani Islamic militant group that provided shelter for Al-Qaeda militants who fled Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.
Officials have blamed it for a December 25, 2003 suicide attack targeting President Pervez Musharraf's motorcade that left 14 people dead.
Musharraf escaped unscathed.
Its former top commander, Amjad Farooqi, was described as the main link-man between Pakistani militants and Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network after 9/11.
Farooqi was allegedly the man who drove Al-Qaeda number three Khalid Sheikh Mohammad to the southern city of Karachi where Mohammad beheaded Pearl, who worked for the Wall Street Journal, after his abduction in early 2002.
Farooqi was shot dead by security forces in 2004.
Mohammed, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and transferred to US custody a week later, has admitted during a closed-door US military hearing in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to having beheaded the journalist. - AFP/ch
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