|
ISLAMABAD - Set in the leafy suburbs of Islamabad close to foreign embassies, nobody appeared to know the extent to which the Red Mosque had become infested with hardcore militants linked to Al-Qaeda.
The mosque's squads of burqa-wearing, stick-wielding women students and their male counterparts had certainly unnerved the city's residents with their Taliban-style anti-vice campaign in recent months.
Their activities, such as burning piles of CDs and abducting people from alleged brothels, raised fears about the spread of militancy from Pakistan's tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
But mosque leader Abdul Aziz and his brother Abdul Rashid Ghazi -- despite having spent time with Afghanistan's Taliban -- were regarded as heavier on rhetoric than action.
Perceptions began to change after fighting broke out at the mosque on July 3 amid tensions over the kidnapping by its students of seven Chinese, including six women, and sparking a siege.
When Aziz fled the compound in a women's burqa on Wednesday, the situation still seemed faintly farcical.
But over the next week even security officials who knew of the mosque's connections to hardliners became unnerved by the ferocity of their defiance and began to suspect that senior militants may be inside.
"We were taken by surprise by the strength of the resistance," a security official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Ministers said at the weekend that they now realised several "foreign" militants were inside -- Pakistani official shorthand for rebels linked to Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.
A militant from the Jaish-e-Mohammed extremist organisation accused of links to an attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz in 2004 was killed early in the siege, they said.
Officials also said there were commanders including some from the banned extremist group Harkatul-Jihad-e-Islami, which has been accused of involvement in the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl and an attempt to kill Musharraf.
Ghazi and Aziz had always denied the presence of militants, saying that it is merely home to 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 the tribal belt.
The clerics and their late father, who founded the mosque, were proteges of Pakistani intelligence during the 1979-89 anti-Soviet jihad and later in supporting the Taliban rise to power in Afghanistan, officials said.
After 9/11 their relations with the spy agencies changed as the mosque became a focal point for anger against Musharraf for supporting the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
In 2005 some arms were found in a vehicle owned by Ghazi, after which police picked up several suspects for plotting attacks.
A terrorism case was lodged against Ghazi but it was shelved on the intervention of religious affairs minister Ijaz-ul Haq, the son of former military dictator Zia-ul-Haq. - AFP/ir
|
|
|
