MIDDLE EAST:President Pervez Musharraf vowed yesterday to step up the fight against gun-toting fundamentalists, as the first funerals were held for militants killed in the Red Mosque siege and a defiant captured cleric predicted an Islamic revolution in Pakistan.
"Extremism is not finished in this country. We have to fight it and we have to finish it," the general said, promising new weapons and training for security forces along the Afghan border.
Gen Musharraf appealed for a sense of unity among a nation still reeling from an eight-day siege that left at least 108 people dead. "The goal was not to kill people, it was to rescue children," he said.
But questions lingered about whether the government was masking the true extent of civilian casualties.
Angry relatives of madrasa students congregated at a graveyard on the outskirts of Islamabad as sealed coffins were lowered into unmarked graves. Many claimed that the military had put more than one body in each coffin. At a press conference earlier in the day the MMA coalition of hardline religious parties claimed the real death toll was between 400 and 1,000 people.
The prime minister Shaukat Aziz said not a single body of a woman or child had been found. But the army said it had found 19 charred corpses - apparently killed in suicide attacks or petrol bomb accidents - that were impossible to identify.
In a remote village in southern Punjab Maulana Abdul Aziz, the Red Mosque's chief cleric caught fleeing under a burka, gave an incendiary graveside oration for his brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who died in a hail of bullets on Tuesday. "We can let our necks be severed, but we cannot bow down before oppressive rulers. Our struggle will continue. There are many Ghazis living to be martyred," he said. "God willing, Pakistan will have an Islamic revolution soon." Twenty-four hours after military operations ended the army conducted the first tours of the compound. Reporters found evidence of a fierce battle.
The militants made their last stand in Jamia Hafsa, a multistorey girls' school that dominates the mosque compound. Bullet holes and shrapnel marks peppered the walls of courtyards, classrooms and dormitories. The acrid whiff of teargas hung in the air. Blackened walls marked a room where a suicide bomber exploded in the face of advancing commandos. "We found his head in the courtyard," said one military official.
A warped locker beside a blasted wall marked the spot where the rebels' leader, Ghazi, had died. A stash of rifles, gas masks and bullets offered a glimpse of the militants' arsenal, while piles of jihadist CDs were all that remained of their efforts to turn Pakistan into a sharia-law state.
But equally remarkable was the absence of evidence that many people had died. Every trace of blood had been scrubbed from the mosque walls. Only a faint smell of teargas lingered. The scene contrasted with reports in national newspapers in which official sources described piles of "hundreds" of bodies and an overwhelming stench of rotting flesh.
Army officials admitted they had "sanitised" the mosque before media visits but denied that the death toll had been falsified.
Gen Musharraf's security forces are braced for a possible violent backlash. There are already signs of unrest. Suicide bombers killed seven people, three of them policemen, in two attacks in North West Frontier province. More attacks are feared today. Analysts questioned whether he has the will or ability to follow through on his promises of madrasa reform. After previous crises - most notably the July 7th bombings in Britain, when several of the attackers were reported to have trained in Pakistan - the president promised change, but the results have disappointed.