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15:04, July 06, 2007 |
Fears mounted that women and children were being used as human shields at a besieged mosque in Pakistan's capital yesterday, as hundreds of militant students ignored a plea from their captured leader to surrender.
Pakistan's Deputy Information Minister Tariq Azim Khan said the few students who had quit the mosque yesterday had spoken of a nightmare scenario for security forces trying to keep casualties to a minimum.
"A large number of women and children are being held hostage by armed men in a room," Khan told a news conference, adding that the brother of the captured cleric was hiding in the basement of an attached madrasa with 25 "women hostages".
"Yes, they're using them as human shields, because the people who have come out, they told us that they're telling women and children not to worry because as long you're here forces will not attack us," he said.
In an interview broadcast earlier on state television, the leader of the Red Mosque's Taliban-style student movement, caught the previous evening trying to escape wearing a woman's burqa, said 850 students remained inside, including 600 women and girls.
Abdul Aziz, clad in a woman's all-enveloping garment like the one he was caught in, began the interview by dramatically lifting the black veil to reveal a face dominated by a bushy grey beard.
He said only 14 men were armed with Kalashnikovs in the Islamabad mosque, though an Interior Ministry spokesman put "hard core elements" between 30 and 40, and a senior paramilitary officer reckoned there were 100 armed men.
Smiling through much of a bizarre interview Aziz said he had wanted to leave the mosque, and had urged others to do the same, but some women teachers had persuaded girls to stay behind.
"They are not being used as human shields, we only gave them passion for jihad," said Aziz, who was later remanded in court.
Hundreds of police and soldiers, backed by armored personnel carriers and with orders to shoot armed resisters on sight, have sealed off the Red Mosque, or Lal Masjid, and imposed an indefinite curfew in the neighborhood around it.
Aziz said it was time for all the students to leave.
"For students to stay put at the mosque will only be damaging ... they should either leave, if they can, or surrender."
The death toll from the violence that began on Tuesday with clashes outside the mosque rose to at least 17 after a security officer said a student was killed in pre-dawn firing.
Source: China Daily/agencies
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