Militants occupy Pakistan shrine

Militants occupy Pakistan shrine

They are also reportedly planning a religious school for girls, to be named after a seminary in the Red Mosque.

The mosque was the scene of a siege this month in which 100 people died.

On Friday, a suicide bomber killed at least 13 people near the mosque.

“In every corner”

Eyewitnesses said a signboard reading Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) was put up outside the shrine, in the Lakaro sub-division of Mohmand Agency, on Saturday night.

A local journalist, Mukaram Khan Atif, who visited the shrine on Sunday, told the BBC's Urdu service that heavily armed militants, wearing masks, had taken up positions in the surrounding areas and were frisking everyone who entered the mosque or the shrine.

He said the militants' leader, who introduced himself as Omar Khalid, told him that a seminary for boys, named after Haji Sahib Turangzai, and another for girls, named Jamia Hafsa Umme Hassan, would be soon built on the premises.

The militants have said they would create Red Mosques and Jamia Hafsa seminaries in every corner of the country.

A Mohmand Agency administration official confirmed the occupation of the shrine by the militants, but made no further comment.

Aggressive campaign

Mr Rashid said no law and order problem was expected in the area as the local people were Taleban supporters.

Earlier in July, Pakistani troops stormed the Red Mosque after its clerics and students waged an increasingly aggressive campaign to enforce strict Sharia law in Islamabad.

The mosque had become a centre of radical Islamic learning and housed several thousand male and female students in adjacent seminaries.

More than 100 people were killed in the siege, including 11 soldiers and an as yet unknown number of militants and their hostages.

The attack on the mosque was the fiercest battle fought by security forces in Pakistan since President Musharraf vowed to dismantle the jihadi network in the country in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001.

More than 180 people have been killed in militant attacks in the past few weeks.