Islamabad, July 13: Muslim protesters Friday vented their fury at Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, burning his effigy and an "Uncle Sam" puppet and vowing to avenge this week's deadly Red Mosque raid.
General Musharraf, a US-backed military ruler, fuelled Islamist anger with this week's army assault on the pro-Taliban mosque complex in Islamabad that left 86 dead in a fierce 36-hour battle, most of them militants.
Protest rallies were held across the world's second largest Islamic nation on the traditional Muslim day of prayer to condemn the military raid that turned central Islamabad into a war zone this week.
"The military action on the Red Mosque is causing hatred in the hearts of Muslims in Pakistan," former parliamentarian Hafiz Fazal Mohammad told a rally in the southwestern city of Quetta, near the Afghan border.
Protesters then set fire to the effigy of Musharraf, who ordered the assault on the Islamabad mosque compound after a months-long standoff with hardliners who had demanded Islamic law be imposed in the capital.
Another 20,000 men, women and children offered prayers for the victims at a meeting at a Lahore mosque run by a hardline Islamist group that has been blacklisted by the United States as a terrorist organisation.
Protesters there set fire to a puppet of "Uncle Sam," the personification of the United States with a goatee and top hat, and waved banners threatening revenge against Musharraf and US President George W. Bush.
"Killer, killer, Musharraf, killer!" the crowd chanted. "Justice, justice, we seek justice!"
"This was genocide, hundreds of innocent women and children died," said cleric Mohammad Saeed, the head of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the political wing of the banned Kashmiri militant group Laskhar-e-Taiba.
The army says the raid killed 11 soldiers and 75 people inside the mosque, most of them militants, although an army spokesman said 19 of the bodies were so badly burned "they could be anybody, any gender, any age."
Interior Minister Aftab Ahmad Sherpao said several unidentified foreigners may be among the dead, telling a media briefing "there may be more than four to five" but declining to give further details.
Security sources said the remains of two Central Asians and one African had been recovered, and that their identities were being investigated.
Sherpao also said the sweep-up operation after the raid had ended and that a curfew in city blocks around the mosque would be lifted early Saturday, although the mosque itself would remain under lockdown.
Pakistan, on high alert for revenge attacks after the raid, boosted security Friday, deploying tens of thousands of police and troops, after Al-Qaeda urged Pakistanis to rise up against the government.
Two suicide blasts killed eight people on Thursday, and police on Friday said they seized three men and a car packed with seven suicide vests, 100 mortar shells and other explosives in northwestern Dera Ismail Khan town.
In the capital, hundreds of protesters called for holy war and chanted "Glory be to the Red Mosque martyrs" at a rally organized by Pakistan's main alliance of radical parties, the Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal.
"This carnage will prove to be the last nail in the coffin of Musharraf's dictatorial rule in Pakistan," the group's deputy leader Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Hydri told the gathering.
"Now there will be Red Mosques everywhere in Pakistan."
In the Islamist heartland city of Peshawar, near the Afghan border, some 2,000 people shook their fists and chanted "Destroy Musharraf" when a top cleric asked them to follow the lead of rebel leader Abdul Rashid Ghazi.
Ghazi died in a hail of bullets in the Red Mosque Tuesday.
More than 2,000 protesters also marched through the Himalayan gateway town of Gilgit to condemn the military crackdown, while traders went on strike.
Friday's protests came a day after Musharraf -- under Western pressure to root out Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants -- vowed to crack down on militancy and announced more guns and tanks for troops in troubled Afghan border regions.
"Extremism and terrorism have not yet been eliminated," he said, vowing that "we are determined to root them out from every corner of the country."
Bureau Report
First Published: Friday, July 13, 2007, 00:00