Defiant Pakistan cleric says mosque has guns

A fundamentalist mosque behind a morality campaign in the Pakistani capital has guns on the premises and will defend itself if the government attempts a crackdown, a top cleric said yesterday.The Lal Masjid or Red Mosque in Islamabad has caused the government headaches with its Taliban-style vice patrols and by issuing a “fatwa” against a female minister for being pictured hugging a paragliding instructor.
“If it comes to a do-and-die situation we will use our right to self defence,” Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the mosque’s deputy leader, said by telephone.“Whatever arms we have are with licences obtained in the past through normal official procedures,” he said when asked to comment on what appeared to be assault rifles carried by young devotees standing guard on the mosque’s walls.The bearded mullah refused to respond to comments by intelligence sources that the students of two Islamic schools which are attached to the mosque had stored petrol to make crude firebombs.
On Friday, Abdul Aziz, the chief cleric at the mosque in downtown Islamabad, and Ghazi’s brother threatened to launch “thousands” of suicide attacks if government security forces launched an operation against the compound.He also announced the formation of an Islamic “Shariah” court, which two days later issued the fatwa against Tourism Minister Nilofar Bakhtiar.The government of military ruler President Pervez Musharraf is continuing negotiations with the mosque’s leaders despite public pressure to tackle what has been described as “Talibanisation” in the heart of the capital. Musharraf told a public rally in the eastern city of Sialkot that the mosque’s male and female students were not the real enemy in the battle against extremism, and that the government did not want to fight them.“Newspapers say the government is weak and I am showing signs of weakness or some fear.
It is not a question of any fear,” Musharraf said. “But they are not enemies that we should attack and eliminate.”Casualties in any raid on the mosque would be bad for Musharraf, a proponent of moderate Islam and key US ally in the war on terror, at a time when he faces a political crisis over his removal of Pakistan’s chief justice.
Male and female students from the mosque’s schools have launched morality patrols targeting local music and video shops, as well as briefly kidnapping two policemen and three women including an alleged brothel owner.They have also refused to vacate a government library for children they occupied in January in protest at the demolition of several mosques that authorities said were built on illegally occupied land.
Courtesy: GT