More than 50 dead as troops storm Red Mosque

Fears mounted of large-scale casualties at Islamabad's Red Mosque as an all-out assault on the compound by Pakistani security forces moved into its twelfth hour.

The official death toll stood at 50 militants and eight soldiers but in a phone call to a local television station the mosque's chief cleric, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, said there were "dead bodies everywhere".

Special forces soldiers attacked from three directions just before dawn in a bid to end the seven-day siege of the radical mosque. But by afternoon they were still battling for control of the Jamia Hafsa madrasa, or religious school, which military officials described as a sprawling 75-room complex.

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