July 11, 2007	Wednesday	Jamadi-us-Sani 25, 1428

ISLAMABAD, July 10: With explosions and machinegun fire rattling in the background, the distraught parents of children trapped inside the Lal Masjid could only gaze helplessly towards the trails of black smoke.

At dawn on Tuesday troops stormed the mosque compound, which includes a madressah, and spent the rest of the day fighting militants holed up inside. At least 58 people were confirmed dead.

Family members have spent the last eight days while the mosque was under siege waiting at a makeshift registration area, next to a school tennis court, for news of their loved ones.

“When I hear these blasts and gunfire I feel that they are piercing me in the chest,” said Maqsood Hussain, 45, a labourer from the north-western city of Abbottabad, whose 14-year-old son Aitasham Ali was inside the compound.

Most of the parents were visibly disturbed, sitting on the ground or at the roadside, some of them on mobile phones. Many of the men chain-smoked.

Barbed wire ringed the area while a stream of ambulances and heavily armed troops in pickup trucks constantly whizzed past.

The army set up lorries to block the view of the Lal Masjid several hundred metres away but could neither block out the pillar of black smoke rising above it nor the sounds of combat.

There was a brief disturbance when several burqa-clad women who had been taken out of the mosque complex by security forces began chanting “Al-Jihad! Al-Jihad!”

The mood was markedly different from the previous day, when many parents were hopeful about efforts by ministers and clerics to thrash out a solution with the hard-line cleric leading the mosque.

Many complained that the government had done nothing to keep them informed.

Others said the authorities had set up meal tents for officials and the media but gave them nothing.

Some parents said their Islamic faith kept them going.

“Our faith is that when death comes it should come in the name of the Almighty,” said Jamila Bibi, who has waited for news of her son Mahmood.

Qazi Khalilur Rehman, 50, said his 17-year-old son Ajmal Mahmood was not a student from the madressah but he was caught inside when the unrest started a week ago.

“Since then we don't know if he is dead or alive,” said Rehman as he sat on a patch of grass where he had listened to the sounds of automatic weapons for more than 12 hours.

Abid Hussain Shah from Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, said he had been sitting in the open for three days waiting for his sister Sadia Bibi, 22, a student at the mosque's madressah for the last four years.

“Yesterday when the negotiations were going on I was very hopeful, but since this morning it sounds like they are invading a country,” he said.

“With this amount of explosives they could blow up a mountain. Now I can only pray that the Almighty keeps my sister alive.”—AFP