Rallies against Pak crackdown fall flat

Pakistani men pull a car away from a burning police motorcycle, which was torched by activists of the six party Islamic alliance, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) during a demonstration in Islamabad yesterday. Pakistani Muslim hardliners protested against a crackdown on Islamic militants ordered by President Pervez Musharraf this week in response to the July 7 London bombings. PHOTO: AFP

More than 300 militant suspects have been detained across Pakistan since revelations that three of the four London bombers were British Muslims of Pakistani origin who had visited the country before the attacks.

Pakistan's main alliance of Islamist parties, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, called for protest rallies after Friday prayers, when tens of millions of Pakistanis visit mosques.

But like previous calls for demonstrations against President Pervez Musharraf's support for the US-led "war on terror," it failed to draw big crowds.

Up to 700 Islamists, most of them teenagers or in their 20s, chanted anti-Musharraf and anti-US slogans at Islamabad's Lal or Red Mosque, which was raided by security forces searching for militants on Tuesday.

Some shouted slogans in support of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan's fundamentalist Taliban government, which was overthrown by US-led forces after the al-Qaeda attacks on US cities on Sept. 11, 2001.

The protesters pelted a police post with stones, destroyed lamp posts and set fire to a police motorcycle.

Similar rallies were held in the cities of Karachi, Lahore, Quetta and Peshawar. Many of the protesters were students from Islamic schools, or madrasas, some of which are accused of being breeding grounds for militancy.

The protests followed a televised address to the nation by Musharraf on Thursday night in which he called for a holy war against preachers of hate and announced steps to rein in militant madrasas and groups seen as having influenced the London bombers.

Young girls who took part in a protest in Islamabad in the morning, some of them not yet in their teens, carried placards saying: "Uncle Musharraf, I am not a terrorist" and "Mr Tony and Bush, we are human beings also."

Mairaj-ul-Huda, an MMA leader in Karachi, questioned why there should have been a crackdown in Pakistan.

"British nationals are involved in the London blasts," he told a rally of about 600 supporters in Karachi. "Why then is there a crackdown on religious institutions and religious scholars in Pakistan?"