A chanting throng of more than 100,000 mourners chased away senior Pakistani officials from the funeral of a leading pro-Taliban cleric, police and witnesses said.They hurled shoes at government officials who tried to enter the sprawling stadium where the prayers were being held for Maulana Hassan Jan, 69, who was killed Saturday in the northwestern city of Peshawar. "Get out!" they chanted when Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao arrived, and provincial chief minister Akram Durrani was given similar treatment.
Security officials hurriedly escorted Durrani out of the stadium to other chants directed against Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and US President George W. Bush.
The crowd, mostly made up of students at religious schools, also smashed windows and gates at the stadium, witnesses said.
Provincial information minister Asif Iqbal said more than 100,000 people attended the prayers, and that Jan was buried at a graveyard on the outskirts of Peshawar. Jan, who preached a message of harmony among different Muslim sects, was a respected Islamic teacher who had pupils in Pakistan, Afghanistan and several other Arab and Islamic countries. He taught Sharia law in Saudi Arabia and was an influential figure among Taliban leaders, including the hardline militia's fugitive chief Mullah Omar, his friends said.
He was against suicide attacks and had issued fatwas (religious decrees), calling suicide bombings "un-Islamic."
A former lawmaker, Jan was among a group of officials and clerics who went to Afghanistan in late 2001 to convince Mullah Omar to expel Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following the September 11 attacks in the United States.
He was shot dead by unidentified gunmen who fled in a car, in what senior police office Tahir Khan called a "terrorist act." "The murder was plotted to trigger unrest in the country," he said.
Jan was also a vice-president of the Pakistan madrassa federation, which looks after thousands of seminaries across the country.
