Pakistan rejects radical cleric's surrender terms

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A cleric holed up in a Pakistani mosque said on Friday he and hundreds of followers were willing to surrender, but set conditions authorities rejected after three days of violence in which 19 people have died.

The government said the attempt to attach demands, including safe passage, was unacceptable and insisted cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi release women and children being held as human shields.

Violence erupted outside the Red Mosque, or Lal Masjid, in the capital on Tuesday after months of rising tension between the authorities and the mosque's Taliban-supporting clerics and their thousands of religious student followers.

Hundreds of troops and police are surrounding the fortified mosque in a leafy central Islamabad neighborhood.

There was intermittent gunfire and explosions on Thursday and early on Friday. Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said troops had blasted some holes in the compound walls.

The government has ordered the students to surrender and about 1,200 of them have come out. But resistance from those inside, who authorities say include militants from banned groups armed with rifles and grenades, was stiff.

Ghazi, speaking in telephone interviews from the mosque, said he wanted safe passage for himself and his followers.

"There are no militants from banned organizations among the students," Ghazi told Aaj Television.

He later told Geo TV students coming out could be screened so authorities could see none was a militant: "They should announce a ceasefire and come here and discuss a screening process."

He also asked that he and his sick mother be allowed to live in the mosque "until I make some alternative arrangements".

But the government rejected any conditions and said the only option was surrender.

"If he is sincere in his offer then first of all he should immediately release the women, girls and innocent children who are being kept there forcefully," Cheema told a news conference.

"They should leave their weapons in the mosque and come out."

Many Pakistanis welcomed the action against the clerics and their hardline students, whose behavior had been reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Moderate politicians and the media have for months urged President Pervez Musharraf to tackle them, but he cited concern about bloodshed and authorities tried to appease them.

Musharraf, who has been under pressure from Western allies to do more to tackle militancy, faces an election this year and while a peaceful and successful end to the stand-off would win him credit, heavy casualties in an assault would be damaging.

"HONOURABLE EXIT"

Ghazi's elder brother and chief cleric of the mosque, Abdul Aziz, was captured on Wednesday trying to escape in a woman's all-enveloping burqa.

Authorities don't know how many people are in the mosque but Aziz, in an interview broadcast on Thursday, said 850 students were there, 600 of them female. He urged them to give up.

The government said many of those inside were being kept against their will as human shields.

The clerics and their followers, most of whom are in their 20s and 30s, launched an increasingly provocative campaign from January to press various demands, including action against vice. They threatened suicide attacks if suppressed.

But it was last month's kidnapping of six women and a man from China -- Pakistan's most steadfast ally -- whom the students said were involved in prostitution, that was a key factor forcing government action.

The Lal Masjid has been a centre of radical Islam for years but its supporters' increasing assertiveness is seen as part of a phenomenon known as "Talibanization" -- the spread of militant influence from remote Afghan border regions to central areas.

A friend of Ghazi's, former security official and Islamist Khalid Khuwaja, said the cleric wanted a just way out: "He simply wants an honorable exit, otherwise he'd prefer death."

(Additional reporting by Faisal Aziz)