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ISLAMABAD - Pakistani security forces fired a series of "warning blasts" before dawn near Islamabad's radical Red Mosque on Thursday, stepping up pressure on hundreds of militant students inside to surrender, a security official said.
There were about eight explosions at intervals of several minutes, witnesses said. Some gunfire also erupted but both the blasts and gunfire stopped after about 20 minutes.
"They were warning blasts. We have not yet entered the mosque," said the official, who declined to be identified.
The blasts were followed by an announcement from security force loudspeakers outside the Lal Masjid calling on students inside to give up, a witness said.
"All people in the mosque should surrender or they will be responsible for losses," the witness, who lives in the neighbourhood, cited security forces as saying over loudspeakers.
Liberal politicians have for months pressed President Pervez Musharraf to crack down on a pair of cleric brothers in charge of the mosque and their Taleban-style movement of thousands of religious students.
The students, some of whom have guns, had undertaken a series of provocative acts over the past six months to press for various demands including action against vice. The clerics had threatened suicide attacks if force was used against them.
Sixteen people have been killed in violence that erupted at the fortified mosque on Tuesday after students clashed with paramilitary soldiers at a checkpoint.
The security official said part of a wall of the sprawling mosque compound had been brought down by one of the blasts, and security forces had also fired in teargas.
Reporters in the vicinity said security forces have ordered them away as the blasts began.
Hundreds of police and soldiers, backed by armoured personnel carriers and with orders to shoot armed resisters on sight, sealed off the mosque and imposed an indefinite curfew in the neighbourhood after Tuesday's clashes.
Up to 1200 students have taken up a government offer of safe passage and 5000 rupees ($110) and surrendered.
In a major coup for the government, the mosque's chief cleric Abdul Aziz, was arrested while trying to escape clad in a woman's all-enveloping burqa on Wednesday.
Aziz ran the mosque with his brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who was still inside the mosque, defying orders to surrender.
Ghazi told Geo TV in a telephone interview that 2000 people were in the mosque, half of them women. Asked if he would surrender he said: "We've done nothing wrong."
He said he had given authorities conditions for a settlement, adding: "We are ready for an honourable solution."
The mosque has a long history of support for militancy but the latest trouble began in January when students, who range from teenagers to people in their 30s, occupied a library to protest against the destruction of mosques illegally built on state land.
They later kidnapped women, including some from China, who they said were involved in prostitution. They also abducted police and intimidated shops selling "obscene" Western films.
Some critics suggested the government initially saw the students' aggressive campaign as a welcome distraction from a political crisis over Musharraf's suspension of the country's top judge in March.
But heavy loss of life in an assault on the mosque would be very damaging for Musharraf in the run-up to elections this year.
The Lal Masjid movement is part of a phenomenon known as "Talebanisation" -- the spread of militant influence from remote tribal regions on the Afghan border into central areas.
A security official said a small, hard core at the mosque was unlikely to give up. Two bomb attacks on security forces on Wednesday in another part of the country killed 12 people and raised fears the mosque's militant allies were hitting back.
- REUTERS
