Pakistan admits women, children killed in Lal Masjid raid

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani authorities have admitted that at least a dozen women and children were killed in the bloody military operation against heavily armed rebels holed up in Islamabad's Lal Masjid compound, the Dawn newspaper said on Saturday.

"In the final assault some 75 people were killed in the complex and I think 50 to 60 were militants and the rest were women and children," Pakistan's Interior Secretary Kamal Shah told reporters on Friday.

The admission of "collateral damage" has undermined the credibility of the government that claimed that most of the women and children thought to have been held hostage by the militants were rescued before Special Forces stormed the fortified complex.

The government has drawn severe criticism for allegedly hiding the actual death toll in the military attack that was launched early Tuesday after the mosque administration and government negotiators failed to break the tense six-month deadlock.

Complaints of missing students have been piling up with the authorities, who are also being accused of burying several bodies in a single coffin.

A large number of parents and relatives of the Islamist students getting religious education at Lal Masjid and its affiliated seminaries in the heart of the capital Islamabad are camped at a 'Facilitation Centre' where students, who had been arrested after they fled the troubled area, were being released.

President Pervez Musharraf has reportedly directed the authorities not to conceal the facts about the operation that, according to revised government figures, left 102 people dead. Eleven soldiers were among those killed in eight days of fighting.