Faithful refuse to offer prayers led by new Khateeb in Lal Masjid
ISLAMABAD: The faithful in Lal Masjid have refused to offer Friday prayers, when new khateeb of Lal Masjid reached there to lead the prayers.
They chanted slogans of “Al Jihad, Al Jihad” and demanded to bring back Maulana Abdul Aziz. Some of the people started crying on this occasion. Later, security officials rushed to provide cover to Maulana Ashfaq and drove him away.
Talking to Geo News, Maulana Ashfaq said that he had refused to accept the ‘imamat’ of Lal Masjid, but the government made assurances that the prayers would be offered in a peaceful environment. Now, he would never lead the prayers in Lal Masjid, Maulana Asfaq added.
Meanwhile, the angry protestors also expelled MMA leader, Liaquat Baloch from the mosque.
Unrest at siege mosque reopening
Hundreds of religious students at Pakistan's Red Mosque in Islamabad have prevented a government-appointed cleric from leading prayers at its reopening.
The students chanted slogans against President Pervez Musharraf and pushed journalists out of the building, which has been repainted and repaired.
They demanded the return of the mosque's detained pro-Taleban former chief cleric, Abdul Aziz.
The Islamabad mosque was the scene of a bloody siege that ended on 11 July.
"I was told everything would be peaceful. I was never interested in taking up this job and after today I will never do it," the government appointed cleric, Mohammad Ashfaq told AFP news agency as he left the mosque with a police escort.
Correspondents say the students stopped him speaking at the mosque's pulpit and used the microphone to condemn the government raid on the mosque.
Renovated building
Troops stormed the mosque on 10 July after its clerics and students waged an increasingly aggressive campaign to enforce strict Sharia law in Islamabad.
The mosque had become a centre of radical Islamic learning and housed several thousand male and female students in adjacent seminaries.
The reopened mosque has got a new roof, and the bullet-pocked walls have been repaired and painted. The debris of the badly damaged seminary for girls is being removed.
The chief of Dyala prison in Rawalpindi told Pakistan's Supreme Court that 567 of the 620 students detained during the siege and 36-hour battle have been freed. Of those still being held, three of them are women.
A legal aid committee says it has received 58 complaints from relatives about men who are said to be missing following the siege.
The 102 people killed in the siege included 11 soldiers and an as yet unknown number of extremists and their hostages.
The attack on the mosque was the fiercest battle fought by security forces in mainland Pakistan since President Musharraf vowed to dismantle the militant jihadi network in the country in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US.
LLS