Agence France-Presse,
ISLAMABAD (AFP): Pakistani troops Wednesday cleared the last militants from the Red Mosque in Islamabad after two days of intense fighting that left at least 82 people dead and turned the capital into a battleground.
Commandos killed the final hardcore of rebels who fought to the death in tunnels and bunkers beneath the living quarters of their chief, pro-Taliban cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who was shot dead late Tuesday.
As the guns fell silent, troops began combing for booby traps left by the insurgents, some linked to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, in the sprawling mosque and an adjoining girls' religious school.
“The first phase, of flushing out and clearing the area of militants, is over,” chief military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad told AFP at the end of 36 hours of fighting that followed a week-long siege.
A second phase to clear explosive devices laid by the rebels was almost over, he added.
Arshad said at least 73 militants were killed together with nine soldiers.
Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said no bodies of women or children had been found despite earlier statements by officials that the Islamists were holding hundreds of them in the mosque.
“What the troops are doing now is mopping up, picking up. There may be booby-traps and other such things so they are going room to room to clear the premises,” he told reporters.
The mosque was badly damaged and booby-traps were found “everywhere,” a security official who inspected the scene told AFP. Journalists have not been able to visit the site.
Around 60 women and children have emerged from the complex since 164 special forces troops launched the assault at dawn on Tuesday. Officials said that a number of them were in hospital.
Another 1,300 people, around two-thirds of them women, fled earlier in the standoff. Officials said initial estimates of the number left when the raid started appeared to have been overstated.
President Pervez Musharraf ordered the assault after talks with Ghazi to free the women and children allegedly held during the siege collapsed. The siege itself left 24 people dead, including two soldiers.
Musharraf was Thursday set to address the nation about the crisis and a new strategy to combat extremism.
The body of Ghazi and two other unidentified people were flown to the cleric's home village of Sadwani in Punjab province for burial at a madrassa built by his father, who also founded the Red Mosque, officials said.
His mother, who also died in the raid, will be buried elsewhere, they said.
The storming of the mosque came months after Ghazi and his burqa-clad female students from the girls' madrassa launched a campaign involving kidnappings to bring Taliban-style Islamic laws to Islamabad.
Street battles broke out on July 3 between police and the mosque's radical students about a week after they abducted seven Chinese people accused of involvement in prostitution.
Ghazi, 43, the public face of the mosque and its deputy leader, said before he was killed in the fighting that he and his followers would rather die than surrender and hoped his death would spark an Islamic revolution in Pakistan.
His brother, head cleric Abdul Aziz, was caught trying to flee the mosque in a burqa a week ago.
The mosque uprising in the heart of the capital, close to foreign embassies, has posed an unprecedented challenge to military ruler Musharraf, a key ally in the US-led “war on terror.”
The US State Department praised Pakistan's “responsible” decision to storm the mosque.
Pakistani newspapers generally backed the raid but signs of an Islamist backlash to the siege have begun. Security forces have ordered a nationwide alert for suicide attacks.
Hundreds of fundamentalists protested on Wednesday in Karachi, Pakistan's biggest city, in the northwestern city of Peshawar, near the country's militant-infested tribal areas, and in Quetta in the southwest.
Five policemen were wounded by a roadside bomb on Tuesday in the northwestern district of Dir, which has close links to the mosque, while armed men burned down tents belonging to aid agencies in the nearby town of Battagram.
Suspected militants tried to shoot down Musharraf's plane on Friday in an incident that officials said was in revenge for the mosque siege.
