Pakistan's Crisis Deepens

The sense of crisis gripping Pakistan swelled today as a bloody mosque siege stretched into its fourth day, suspected militants targeted President Pervez Musharraf's plane and a suicide bomber killed six soldiers near the Afghan border.

Gunfire rang out in a congested district of Rawalpindi in the morning, shortly after a plane carrying Gen Musharraf took off. The aircraft was not hit and police traced the shots to a nearby house where they found a rifle and an anti-aircraft gun on the roof.

Security officials described it as a failed assassination attempt but the main military spokesman, Major General Waheed Arshad, said that only the AK-47 rifle had been discharged, suggesting the president was in only limited danger.

Gen Musharraf's plane landed safely in western Baluchistan province, where recent floods killed 200 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. The military leader has already survived two assassination attempts, a fact that has burnished his reputation as a warrior against militancy amongst western allies.

The degree to which extremism has taken root during Gen Musharraf's eight-year rule of Pakistan was clear in nearby Islamabad, however, where his troops continued their siege of the Red Mosque complex.

Bursts of heavy gunfire coupled with deafening explosions erupted from the mosque throughout the day, interspersed with loudhailer appeals from officers calling on the militants inside to give themselves up.

An estimated 400-500 students were inside the mosque, 60 of them heavily armed with automatic weapons, grenades and petrol bombs, according to the interior minister. The remainder are said to be mostly children, about half of them girls. Their leader, the radical cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi, declared he would rather die than surrender.

"We can be martyred but we will not court arrest," he said in a defiant interview with a local television station. "We are more determined now."

The minister of state for information, Tariq Azim, dismissed the talk of martyrdom as a bluff, noting that Ghazi's brother Abdul Aziz had already been captured trying to flee the mosque under the disguise of a burka.

Ghazi denied he was forcing students as young as five to remain inside the bullet-marked mosque, but worried parents waiting outside told a different story.

At lunchtime his militants opened fired on a group of relatives as they approached the mosque, shooting one man in the foot. He limped back to army lines and was sent to hospital.

"They say they are Islamic but they go outside in a burka," raged Babar Khan, who was waiting for his two teenage cousins. "Meanwhile poor children are going to die."

The siege has traumatized Islamabad, a carefully planned and often lethargic city where residents like to joke about the dullness of life. The Red Mosque is in the heart of G-6, a tree-lined neighborhood popular with Pakistani bureaucrats and foreign diplomats.

Since Tuesday G-6 has been cut off from the outside world by barbed wire and troops with orders to shoot on sight. Residents have been roused from sleep by barrages of gunfire and explosion. "It's been absolutely terrifying," said one.

An indefinite curfew was briefly lifted today to allow residents to seek food or escape to a safer sector.

The rise of violent extremism was also highlighted in Dir, a remote town in North West Frontier province, where a suicide bomber flung himself at an army convoy. Six soldiers were killed and three injured, Reuters reported.