Hundreds of students gathered outside Lal Masjid on Friday and chanted slogans against President Pervez Musharraf to mark the anniversary of the bloody storming of the building. Carrying the mosque's signature black flags with crossed swords.
Around 700 protesting students gathered after Friday prayers and shouted "Hang Musharraf, Musharraf is a murderer, America's friends are traitors", an AFP reporter said. Religious leaders vowed to lead a "revolution" in memory of Abdul Rashid Ghazi, one of the mosque's main leaders, who was killed in the school that was attached to the mosque and demolished after the operation played religious songs on tape recorders during the demonstration.
The female students became a symbol of the mosque's defiance last year, and it was their kidnapping of several Chinese nationals allegedly involved in prostitution that sparked the deadly siege. Ghazi's nephew Omar Farooq called for the release of the mosque's leader, Abdul Aziz, who was captured while trying to flee the mosque dressed in a Burqa on the second day of the siege.
"The Lal Masjid operation was launched on the orders of the US by its stooge, Pervez Musharraf," he told AFP, adding that authorities should reopen the mosque for Islamic schooling. A lawmaker from the PML-N Tariq Fazal also joined the protest and called on Muslims to "foil conspiracies hatched by anti-Islamic forces". "Ghazi embraced martyrdom for Islam and his sacrifice will not go in vain," said Tariq Fazal.