Pak vows crackdown on rogue Islamic schools

Pakistan's government vowed a crackdown on religious schools promoting Islamic extremism, after a military assault at Islamabad's Red Mosque ending a three-month standoff with clerics killed at least 75 militants.

Hours after Al-Qaida threatened to wreak vengeance for military operation in Lal Masjid, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf vowed to eliminate terrorism from the country.

In an address to the nation, he said no mosque or madrassa would be allowed to be "misused" like Lal Masjid.

"Extremism and terrorism have still not been eliminated from Pakistan, but we are determined to eliminate them," Musharraf said.

The government will continue to support "religious education" at the nation's 17,000 madrassas, although it won't tolerate militancy, the official Associated Press of Pakistan cited Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz as saying yesterday.

Religious parties in Pakistan, the world's second largest Muslim country, yesterday protested the military operation as al-Qaeda issued a purported Internet video demanding revenge.

The assault may widen President Pervez Musharraf's rift with Islamist groups in the nation of 165 million people and fuel the strongest opposition to his rule since he seized power eight years ago in a military coup.

The standoff at the mosque began in April after its chief cleric tried to establish a court and impose Islamic law on the capital. The government said as many as 300 militants, many armed with rocket launchers and machineguns, were sheltering at the complex, which is about 3 km from the president's office.

"The resistance is over and now the clearing up operation is going on,"' Major General Waheed Arshad said in a telephone interview from the capital today. Investigations to identify those killed were being carried out, he said, declining to confirm a report by AAJ Television that nine non-Pakistani militants died in the assault.

"Muslims of Pakistan, your salvation is only through jihad" or holy war, Al-Qaeda's Deputy Commander Ayman al- Zawahiri said in a video, according to the Virginia-based IntelCenter. The raid was a "dirty, despicable crime" that can only be "washed away by repentance or blood."

Pakistan "cannot be engaged in statements with al-Qaeda," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said in a telephone interview today.

"Al-Qaeda keeps on giving these messages,'' army spokesman Arshad said.

The government has announced crackdowns on religious schools in the past. Last year, Musharraf ordered they register with the government and in 2005 demanded they expel non- Pakistani students, after a UK investigation into the London bombings that year showed that at least one of the suicide attackers visited a Pakistani madrassa.