Students say 1,000 orphans were inside Jamia Hafsa during assault

Islamabad: Female students of the controversial seminary Jamia Hafsa, who surrendered to security forces, have disclosed that nearly 1,000 orphaned female students were in the building during the attack and their fate was still unknown.

Talking to media at a rehabilitation centre, Humaira, Azra and Noreen said after the devastating earthquake in Kashmir and Northwest Frontier Province on October 8, 2005, hundreds of orphaned female students were brought to the seminary.

"After the earthquake, about 1,000 orphaned female students were admitted to Jamia Hafsa. Jamia bore all the costs of their residence and education," said Noreen, 23, from Kashmir.

"It is still not clear what happened to those students and where they had gone because they had no place to go," said Humaira, 24, from the North West Frontier Province.

"We surrendered after the launch of the operation and at that time more than 1,000 female students were in the Jamia Hafsa. After our surrender, very few female students came out of the building," they said.

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The female students said "we fail to understand and can't digest the government figure of casualties as there were lots of people in the compound after the launch of the military operation."

They were saddened by the state of affairs and said that although something had gone wrong with the administration, no one had expected such a tragic fate for so many innocent people.

"The government should have exercised more patience and dialogue and should have allowed more chance to solve this crisis amicably," they said.

The government has released photographs of 10 more foreign militants who died during the military's "Operation Silence" against the Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa.

"We have identified 10 more bodies of foreigners who died fighting security forces. We are not sure about their nationality, but their faces clearly show they are foreigners," Interior Ministry spokesman Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema told a press conference in Islamabad.