Mosque massacre: Washington's "war on terror" shakes Pakistan

It is suspected that many of the victims are young madrassa students, drawn from poor families and from the strife-torn regions of Kashmir and the North West Frontier Province. In the course of the siege, frantic family members gathered on street corners outside the barbed-wire barricades erected by the military, hoping for news of their children and relatives trapped inside.

“He is getting dollars for every student from America, Europe and others,” Badshah Rehman, whose two sons were inside the mosque, said of Pakistan’s US-backed military dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf. “He has killed our children for dollars,” he told the Reuters news agency, while keeping vigil with other parents.

Islamabad was rocked by a series of explosions and sustained automatic weapons fire beginning in the pre-dawn hours Tuesday. The besieged mosque is located in the center of the city, and the fighting unfolded in close proximity to government buildings and residential neighborhoods where state officials reside. Much of the Pakistani capital was under curfew, and its inhabitants kept off the streets. There were reports of civilians being struck by stray bullets up to a kilometer away from the mosque.