NYT : Pakistanis Capture Cleric in Mosque Rebellion

Pakistanis Capture Cleric in Mosque Rebellion

By CARLOTTA GALL and SALMAN MASOOD | July 5, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Thursday, July 5 — Pakistani security forces arrested one of the leaders of the rebellion at a radical mosque here in the capital on Wednesday as he tried to escape disguised in a burqa among more than 1,000 students who surrendered at the complex.

Women who left the mosque Wednesday gave their names to a security officer. A cleric who was arrested wore a burqa to disguise himself.

Government officials said they did not know how many people remained inside the mosque, where 10 people were killed Tuesday in clashes with security forces, who locked down the area. The commander of a Pakistani Army Ranger unit at the scene estimated that 70 percent of the complex had emptied, suggesting that 300 people might still be inside.

He predicted that the security forces would have to fight those who refused to give up. “It is the end of the game for them,” he said.

By early Thursday morning, about 3 a.m., several large explosions, mortar fire and a heavy exchange of gunfire could be heard coming from the area of the mosque, indicating that some kind of operation was under way.

The tough measures showed new resolve by the president of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to end a standoff that has proved an embarrassment since January, when the students began a series of challenges to push for the imposition of Islamic law throughout Pakistan.

Western diplomats and General Musharraf’s political opponents here say that the general has failed to stand up to the Islamic extremists and that their widening influence threatens the security of the country, which sits on the front line of American efforts to battle Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

After a bloody and chaotic day on Tuesday, the government moved in heavy armor and more Pakistani Army Rangers overnight, imposing a curfew around the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, which lies just a few blocks from the main government offices.

Those remaining inside the mosque after Tuesday’s violence were given a deadline of 11 a.m. Wednesday to surrender themselves and their weapons. There was to be no negotiation with the clerics, government officials said.

The authorities cut off the power in the area and demanded that residents stay in their houses. Three attack helicopters circled over the mosque several times just before dusk, raising fears that the security forces were preparing to storm the complex.

Last week, General Musharraf cited the bloodshed that would result from storming the compound as a reason for his hesitation, suggesting that he was wary of the popular reaction as well as possible retaliation by extremists.

Officials said bombers struck twice in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing 13 people. At least one of the attacks, they said, may have been a response to events at the Red Mosque.

In one attack, a suicide car bomber hit a Pakistani military convoy in the border region of Bannu, in the North-West Frontier Province, killing six soldiers and four children playing cricket nearby. That attack was probably retaliation for a missile strike on militants in the area that killed 34 people on June 19.

The second attack on Wednesday, a roadside bomb aimed at a local police official, killed three civilians in the district of Swat, said the provincial police chief, Muhammad Sharif Virk. He blamed a local cleric who has been trying to rally support for the clerics under siege in Islamabad.

One of those clerics, Maulana Abdul Aziz, the elder of two brothers running the uprising at the Red Mosque, was arrested as he tried to escape among a crowd of women, dressed like them in a black, all-enveloping burqa, government officials said.

He was spotted by the police because he was taller and larger than the women, Javed Iqbal Cheema, a government spokesman, said at a news briefing late Wednesday.

The younger brother, Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the more vocal of the two, is thought to be still inside the mosque complex, along with some of his armed followers. The religious complex was founded by the brothers’ father, a famous jihadi leader who was assassinated in 1998.

By Wednesday, the tide of popular feeling seemed to be turning against the clerics. Relatives of students who attended separate male and female schools inside the mosque compound said they had not been aware of the presence of weapons in the complex.

But most said both the clerics and the government shared blame for the bloodshed on Tuesday. “We sent our daughters for education, not terrorism,” said Kastabar Ali, 48, a taxi driver whose two nieces were still inside the seminary.

For most of the day, the clerics refused to surrender and were sending mixed signals by asking for more time, officials said. “The two clerics remain defiant so far, and we haven’t received any flexibility from their side,” Mr. Cheema, the government spokesman, said Wednesday evening, minutes before news of Maulana Abdul Aziz’s arrest. “Having said that, I would only say they have no option but to surrender.”

He and other officials said the government was determined to avoid further violence. By midmorning, after another man was shot dead near the mosque overnight, Pakistani Army Rangers in combat gear cordoned off the area with barbed wire.

Security forces then announced over a loudspeaker that the government was offering students 5,000 rupees, about $82, and alternative education in government madrasas if they left the complex.

“We ensure no action against women and children and those who were not involved in any unlawful activity and promise them a safe passage and 5,000 rupees each by President Pervez Musharraf as expenses for traveling to their homes,” the minister of state for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan, said at a news conference in the morning.

“We do not want bloodshed,” he said. “We have repeatedly supported a peaceful resolution to the problem.”

Families were bused in to a meeting place, and steadily during the day female students filtered out with their relatives. Male students were not allowed to go free but were shown on a local television channel walking out in single file, hands aloft and being searched by the police.

They were then taken away for screening, and 170 were being detained on suspicion of involvement in previous offenses, the information minister, Muhammad Ali Durrani, said in the second of four news briefings officials gave during the day.

The government extended the deadline several times because so many students took up the offer to leave the mosque, and by late Wednesday up to 1,200 had come out. “Our strategy is that we vacate the mosque with minimum losses,” Mr. Durrani said.

But the mosque’s leaders were pressing the students to stay, some students and their relatives said. Fez Muhammad from Kashmir, who was leading his two teenage daughters from the complex, said the administrators of the mosque had not wanted them to leave.

“They said if the women and others die, the people will take their side,” he said.

One of his daughters, Taiba, 16, confirmed that the leaders of the mosque had tried to persuade them to stay, and she said that she and her sister left only because their father had insisted. “They said, ‘If you give your life, it will be in the way of God,’ ” she said.

Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.