By DPA,
Rafah (Gaza Strip) : A pro-Al Qaeda group which declared a theocratic Islamic emirate in the Gaza Strip battled it out Friday with Hamas policemen, leaving 16 dead and 120 wounded.
The fate of Abdel Latif Moussa, leader of the Jihad al-Salafi group also known as the Warriors of God, was unknown after Hamas police blew up his house adjacent to the mosque in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah.
He and several followers had been holed up in the complex for more than eight hours.
The clashes began in the afternoon after Moussa, speaking at Friday prayers at a Rafah mosque, announced the theocratic emirate and demanded that Islamic Hamas, which administers the Strip, impose strict Islamic law.
Dozens of group members, masked and brandishing AK-47 assault rifles, took up position outside the mosque. After the prayers had ended, they exchanged fire with members of the Hamas police.
Witnesses said they heard “intensive” gunfire and explosions around the Ibn Tahmeh mosque.
A spokesman of the deposed Hamas government in Gaza Friday accused an extremist Islamic group affiliated with Al-Qaeda of violating the law and rashly seeking to establish an Islamic emirate.
Taher al-Noono told a news conference in Gaza that his government “would never let security chaos return to the Gaza Strip”.
“This group is outside of national and Islamic consensus,” said al-Noono, who vowed to chase the members of the group all over the Gaza Strip that his government has been ruling since June 2007.
He added that all the group’s members “should immediately hand themselves over to the government’s security forces and be disarmed.”
“No one is above the law and the general discipline,” said al-Nounou, who held Sheikh Musa and his group responsible for the fighting in Rafah. Al-Nounou didn’t conform or deny whether Sheikh Musa is still alive or had been killed.
Doctors at Abu Yousef al-Najar Hospital in Rafah town said 16 were killed in the clashes and 120 wounded, more than 20 of them were in serious conditions.
Two of the dead were members of the Izz-a-Din-al-Kassem, the Hamas armed wing, who had come to help root out the pro-Al-Qaeda group.
Hamas police also took up positions in neighbouring houses, and stormed Moussa’s home, later blowing it up with explosives. It was unclear whether Moussa was killed in the blast, whether he had escaped, or been captured.
Al-Noono accused Sheikh Moussa of having good ties with the security apparatuses of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank.
Moussa’s associates have threatened to take bloody revenge on Hamas if he is harmed.
Membership in the Jihad al-Salafi has grown since Hamas, an Islamic group, seized control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007.