By Shaiq Hussain and Candace Rondeaux
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 7, 2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 6 -- At least 10 people were killed in Pakistan's capital Sunday when a suicide bomber detonated explosives near a crowd commemorating a deadly government-led raid on a radical mosque here last year, according to police.

The attack occurred early in the evening after more than 10,000 conservative Islamist protesters and mourners had gathered at the historic Red Mosque to mark the first anniversary of the raid. Witnesses said the crowd was just beginning to disperse when the explosion tore through a cluster of policemen near a post office a few hundred feet from the mosque.

Rana Akbar Hayat, an Islamabad police official, said police believe the bomber may have been hiding behind bushes near the post office when he set off the explosives.

There were conflicting accounts of the number of casualties. An adviser to Pakistan's Ministry of Interior, Rehman Malik, said eight people were killed, but officials at the scene said as many as 15 had died. Several police officers and witnesses said many of those killed were policemen. At least 22 people injured in the blast were taken to two hospitals, police said.

Pakistani police and military forces have been targeted in several major suicide attacks in the past year, a development many here say is a violent backlash against the government of President Pervez Musharraf and his handling of the raid on the Red Mosque a year ago. The commando raid on the mosque and the Jamia Hafsa Islamic seminary for girls killed more than 100 people and ignited a wave of protests and bombings across Pakistan.

On Friday, al-Qaeda's media wing released a video tribute to the victims of the Red Mosque raid. The video, which includes previous messages from al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, lauds the mosque's former leaders for standing up to the Pakistani government and appeals to Muslims around the world to wage "jihad" against the United States. It was the first such video to be released in Urdu, one of Pakistan's two official languages; the other is English.

Trouble at the Red Mosque began as early as January 2007, when dozens of female seminary students barricaded themselves in a campus library to protest a government order to close down illegal mosques.

Tensions mounted last July 3, when at least 20 people were killed in a gun battle between police and mosque supporters who had holed up in the building. Maulana Abdul Aziz, the center's radical Islamist leader, was arrested the next day as he attempted to flee the mosque disguised in a burqa. Two days later, security forces stormed the mosque and killed more than 100 of its supporters, many of whom were armed.

Erected in the 1960s, the Red Mosque has been a center of Islamist fundamentalism since its inception and was known as much for its distinctive red walls as for its large number of students from Pakistan's religiously conservative North-West Frontier Province and tribal areas.

Aziz and his brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, were vocal opponents of Musharraf's military rule and regularly inveighed against the disappearance of thousands of Pakistanis believed to have been arrested by the country's powerful intelligence agencies. Ghazi was killed in the raid.

Their supporters continue to protest Musharraf's government. The mosque's official Web site displays photos of Ghazi's death mask and declares: "You can kill the body but you cannot kill the passion."

The death toll this year from explosive attacks in Islamabad and the nearby garrison city of Rawalpindi is the highest in recent memory, with at least 30 people killed since January.

Rondeaux reported from Kabul.