Pakistan:The sense of crisis gripping Pakistan grew yesterday as a bloody siege of a mosque stretched into its fourth day, suspected militants targeted the plane of the country's president, Pervez Musharraf, and a suicide bomber killed six soldiers near the Afghan border.
Gunfire was heard in a congested district of Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, in the morning shortly after a plane carrying Gen Musharraf took off.
The aircraft was not hit and police traced the shots to a nearby house, where they found an assault rifle and an anti-aircraft gun on the roof.
Security officials described it as a failed assassination attempt, but Maj Gen Waheed Arshad, the chief military spokesman, said that only an AK-47 had been discharged, suggesting the president had been in limited danger.
Gen Musharraf's plane landed safely in Baluchistan province, where recent floods killed 200 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.
He has already survived two assassination attempts, a fact that has burnished his reputation as a warrior against militancy among his western allies.
The degree to which extremism has taken root during Gen Musharraf's eight-year rule of Pakistan was clear in the capital, where soldiers continued their siege of the Red Mosque complex. Bursts of heavy gunfire coupled with deafening explosions rang out from the mosque throughout the day, interspersed with loudhailer appeals from officers calling on the militants inside to give themselves up.
Up to 500 students were inside the mosque, 60 of them armed with automatic weapons, grenades and petrol bombs, according to the interior minister. The remainder are mostly children, about half of them girls.
Their leader, the radical cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi, declared he would rather die than surrender.
"We can be martyred but we will not court arrest," he said in a defiant interview with a local television station. "We are more determined now."
Tariq Azim, the minister of state for information, dismissed the talk of martyrdom as a bluff, noting that Mr Ghazi's brother, Abdul Aziz, had already been captured trying to flee the mosque disguised in a burka.
Mr Ghazi denied he was forcing students as young as five to remain inside the bullet-pocked mosque.
But worried parents waiting outside told a different story. At lunchtime his militants opened fired on a group of relatives as they approached the mosque, shooting a man in the foot.
He limped back to army lines and was dispatched to hospital.
"They say they are Islamic but they go outside in a burka," raged Babar Khan, who was waiting for his two teenage cousins, afterwards. "Meanwhile poor children are going to die."
The siege has traumatised Islamabad, an often lethargic city where residents like to joke about the dullness of life.
The Red Mosque is in the G-6 sector of the city, a tree-lined neighbourhood popular with Pakistani bureaucrats and foreign diplomats. Since Tuesday the area has been cut off from the outside world by barbed wire and troops with orders to shoot on sight.
Residents have been roused from sleep by barrages of gunfire and explosions. "It's been absolutely terrifying," said one.
An indefinite curfew was briefly lifted yesterday to allow residents to seek food or escape to a safer sector.
There was no indication a suicide bomber who killed six soldiers in the northwest was acting in support of the mosque radicals, but they are known to have supporters in the region.
- (Guardian service, Reuters)