Pakistani cleric advises militant followers to surrender

Islamabad - About 250 Islamic students holding out in Islamabad's besieged Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, should surrender because they cannot resist the force assembled against them much longer, their arrested leader Maulana Abdul Aziz said Thursday. Aziz was caught Wednesday night by security forces that have surrounded the mosque as he attempted to flee disguised as a veiled woman with his wife and her students of the Jamia Hafsa seminary inside the mosque complex.
In an interview with the state-run Pakistan Television channel, he said he came out of the mosque secretly "to save the lives of others inside the Lal Masjid."
Aziz said the militant leadership ensconced in the mosque was not pursuing any "personal agenda" but its rebellious actions were intended to put pressure on the government of President Pervez Musharraf "to do its duty to Islam."
"It is a matter of issues, not of challenging the writ of the government," he said, referring to actions like kidnappings by his religious students of police officers and Chinese massage parlour workers in the name of eradicating vice from society.
The dispute turned violent Tuesday when stick-wielding students attacked a police checkpoint near their seminary and seized four officials along with their weapons and two radios, triggering heavy shelling with tear-gas canisters by riot police.
Gunfire then broke out as the markets and streets around the mosque turned into a battlefield as local residents joined the students in their rebellion and threw stones at the building where the security forces were positioned.
Authorities said 16 people, including two soldiers and one journalist, have been killed in the three-day standoff, but witnesses and independent observers placed the death toll at 24, adding that more than 200 people were injured, many suffering bullet wounds.
When accused of using female students of the mosque seminary as human shields, he said, "They were fired up by the spirit of Jihad" and not forced into it.
Aziz's brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, remained inside the mosque and was negotiating with religious leaders to "resolve the situation without bloodshed," but ruling party leader Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, who was approached by Ghazi, said the government wanted the besieged extremists to surrender unconditionally.