Pakistan buries dead from mosque battle

Islamabad: Pakistanis buried bodies on Thursday from among more than 70 followers of a revolutionary cleric, a day after commandos killed the last few gunmen hiding in the ruins of the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, in Islamabad.

Anger at the government's action ran deep in tribal parts of northwest Pakistan, though sentiment in most of the country sided with President Pervez Musharraf's decision to send in the army.

Cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi was killed along with a handful of hardcore militants he had surrounded himself with, making a last stand in the basement of a religious school in the complex.

His elder brother Abdul Aziz, caught fleeing disguised as a woman in the early stages of a week-long siege, was allowed to accompany Ghazi's body for a funeral at their ancestral village in eastern Punjab province.

Al Qaida's second-in-command Ayman Al Zawahri, in an Internet video, called for revenge, stoking fears of a violent backlash from militants exporting the Taliban's hardline version of Islam from the tribal badlands to Pakistani cities.

"If you do not retaliate... Musharraf will not spare you," said Zawahri, believed to be hiding somewhere on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

A cleric read verses from the Koran, the Muslim holy book, though full funeral rites were not observed, according to a Reuters photographer present.

"We are burying them here until their relatives come and identify them," said Rana Akbar Hayat, a senior city administrator supervising the burials.

"All the victims have been fingerprinted and photographed and their DNA test has been taken to help parents and relatives identity them, then the bodies will be handed over."