PAKISTAN: Hardline Islamists threaten Mosque siege reprisals
Updated
Security has been boosted across Pakistan ahead of a threatened wave of protests by hardline Islamists - a day after President Pervez Musharraf vowed to root out extremism from every corner of the country. 10,000 police have been deployed to the main city of Karachi, and thousands more officers are on alert in major cities after a series of suicide attacks in the north-west of the country. The two latest attacks took place in North Waziristan on the border with Afghanistan, and in northeast Pakistan in the town of Swat.
Presenter: Corinne Podger
Speakers: Swat district police officer Akbar Ali; MMA Secretary General Syed Munawar Hasan
PODGER: Security's been boosted across Pakistan ahead of a threatened wave of protests by hardline Islamists - a day after President Pervez Musharraf vowed to root out extremism from every corner of the country.
Ten-thousand police have been deployed to the main city of Karachi, and thousands more officers are on alert in major cities after a series of suicide attacks in the north-west of the country.
The two latest attacks took place in North Waziristan on the border with Afghanistan, and in northeast Pakistan in the town of Swat.
Swat's district police officer Akbar Ali described that attack:
ALI: The security personnel deployed near Takhtaband road signalled a suspected vehicle to stop but despite stopping, the suicide attacker inside the car blew himself up with an explosive device.
PODGER: No one's claimed immediate responsibility for these two attacks, but they follow Taliban and al-Qaida calls for reprisals in revenge for the army assault on Islamabad's Red Mosque this week, in which at least 75 militants died.
Although the government claims there's been widespread support in Pakistan for the Red Mosque assault, the main alliance of Islamist parties opposed to President Musharraf -- the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, or MMA, has called for protest rallies and demonstrations across Pakistan in the coming days.
I spoke earlier to the MMA's secretary general, Syed Munawar Hasan.
Speaking on a mobile phone from Islamabad, he students students at Pakistan's 13,000 religious schools, or madrassas, now fear for their lives in the wake of the Red Mosque siege.
He called on students and what he called "people on the streets" to make President Musharraf feel equally unsafe:
HASAN: Nobody's safety is guaranteed in this country. Whoseover is against United States, and whosoever is against Pervez Musharraf, they call him extremist. So - a billion people live here, and all of them are unsafe. Any time, any moment, Pervez Musharraf and his patrons can kill him. But even then we are struggling and we will continue our struggle, and hopefully all these seminary students and all the people on the streets - they will be safe and President Musharraf will find himself unsafe.
