Raid at Islamabad Mosque Turns Long and Deadly

He returned three hours later with a new offer that Musharraf said was final. The sticking points were whether Ghazi would be allowed to evade prosecution, and what would happen to foreign fighters believed to have been inside the mosque.

When Ghazi did not respond to the revised offer, the negotiating team left and the commandos swooped in.

"At the end, there was hope that we could save women and children," said Mufti Abdul Hameed Rabani, a member of the negotiating team. "But the government wanted to do the operation in a hurry."

Another religious leader who had been part of previous negotiations said the government was to blame for the failure of the talks and had made a hasty decision to conduct the raid, a decision it would later regret. "First it was one Red Mosque in Islamabad," said Maulana Abdul Majeed Hazarvi. "Now you will find Red Mosques everywhere."

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, denied that the government had cut off negotiations preemptively. "The government tried its level best to use every available means to resolve this through dialogue," he said. "There were positive signs and we were very hopeful. But then there was a total breakdown of the dialogue."

The first few hours of the operation produced intense exchanges of gunfire and window-rattling explosions. A thick plume of smoke rose over the mosque, and it appeared as though the radicals had been quickly vanquished when guns fell largely silent for several hours in the late morning.

But inside the compound, militants retreated deeper into the compound, virtually ceding the mosque to the government and massing instead in a warren of basement rooms at the girls' madrassa, where many women and children were being held hostage. Militants and commandos fought from room to room, occasionally hearing women's and children's cries as they "carefully" tried to flush out the militants, Arshad said.

Even beneath the basement, there was a network of tunnels that led between the various buildings in the compound, which takes up two city blocks and includes nearly a dozen structures.

The militants used the tunnels to move from the madrassa to the mosque and up into one of the minarets. Several commandos were shot after a militant fired from the minaret long after the commandos thought it had been cleared.

The Red Mosque standoff attracted round-the-clock coverage from Pakistan's various 24-hour news networks all week, and once the raid began, the government appeared determined not to let them broadcast images that might inflame the public. Reporters were kept far enough from the mosque that they couldn't capture images of the carnage.

By early Wednesday morning, the government could not produce a comprehensive figure of civilian casualties. However, officials struck a somber note as they spoke, and indicated that the death toll may be high.

Abdul Satar Edhi, leader of a human welfare charity, said the government had asked him to be prepared to provide supplies for 300 burials.

One major question left unanswered Wednesday morning was how the radicals had been able to build up such a massive arsenal. The mosque, only a few hundred yards from the president's house, is also close to the headquarters of Pakistan's main intelligence service. Despite its location, the mosque had become a well-defended fortress by the time commandos went in.

"Somebody has to answer for this," said retired Maj. Ikram Sehgal, a security analyst. "This cannot happen in the center of the capital of the country."

Special correspondents Shahzad Khurram in Islamabad and Imtiaz Ali in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.