By DPA
Islamabad : Students still defending Lal Masjid or Red Mosque Friday are reportedly preparing their wills as security forces tightened the stranglehold on the mosque where they have been holed up for the last four days.
Around 450 students wrote down their wills after offering Friday prayers at the Lal Masjid, sources inside the mosque told Geo news channel.
"Our entire struggle and sacrifices were for the enforcement of Islamic law in the country," a student, Salman, said in his will. "We hope that the people of Pakistan will carry forward our efforts for an Islamic justice system."
Earlier, the undeterred cleric of the pro-Taliban mosque rejected demands for an unconditional surrender as security forces maintained the siege of the compound after a three-hour relaxation of the curfew for Friday prayers.
"We can never turn ourselves in. We will accept martyrdom but will not surrender," Lal Masjid deputy administrative head Abdul Rashid Ghazi told Geo News television on telephone from the complex.
Explaining the reasons behind the armed resistance after his overnight statements offering to end the standoff, Ghazi said the decision was taken in the wake of the government's "stubbornness".
The cleric late Thursday sought a "safe passage" to leave the troubled zone, but authorities had rejected anything short of complete surrender.
Recurrent gunfire with a few explosions hit the besieged mosque complex in the centre of Islamabad Friday, with security forces using "dummy mortars" and machine-gun fire to pressure the holed-up Islamists into giving themselves in.
"The call for safe passage is neither appropriate nor does it hold any justification," Interior Minster Aftab Sherpao told national Pakistan Television Friday.
Unconfirmed reports from inside the mosque suggested that there were some 300 men and hundreds of women and children in the heavily fortified compound that houses the Lal Masjid and its Jamia Hafsa seminary for girls.
Security forces surrounding the compound have so far not launched a full-scale attack after President Pervez Musharraf ordered them to keep collateral damage to the minimum.
So far, 19 deaths have been confirmed officially in the siege that started Tuesday afternoon, but witnesses and other independent observers say the number of casualties is much higher.
The mosque administration claimed that at least 30 young female students were killed in Friday's pre-dawn mortar attack on the seminary.
Officials said the besieged militants, who included rebels from banned religious outfits, were using the women and children as human shields, but Ghazi denied the allegations. "There are no militants belonging to jihadi organizations inside the mosque," he told the private Aaj News television channel.
Amid repeated calls for surrender, 1,146 people including 401 women came out of the Red Mosque complex, while some 45 men were captured by the Pakistan Rangers paramilitary forces as they tried to escape after scaling the mosque's walls.
Ghazi's brother and Lal Masjid chief cleric, Maulana Abdul Aziz, was also arrested Wednesday night by security forces when he tried to flee disguised as a veiled woman with his wife and her students from the Jamia Hafsa seminary.
In a bizarre appearance on PTV the next morning, he asked his pupils to surrender because they could not resist the force assembled against them much longer.
"In the situation (the military deployment) that I saw outside,the students taking stand will result in losses and nothing else. If they can leave quietly they should otherwise surrender," Aziz said.
Meanwhile, a special court in the neighbouring city of Rawalpindi remanded Aziz into police custody Thursday for seven days after charging him with plotting terrorist attacks.
The leaders of the Red Mosque vow to implement strict Islamic Sharia law "in every inch of Pakistan." Students affiliated with the mosque's madrassa have warned music store owners to stop selling "un-Islamic" goods, have ordered women not to drive, and have abducted alleged prostitutes in recent months.