Islamabad - Hundreds of burqa-clad students gathered at the radical Red Mosque on Wednesday and held an all-women protest meeting to mark the first anniversary of the bloody commando raid on the mosque compound.

Pakistan's elite special forces stormed the mosque and its adjoining Jamia Hafsa girls' seminary on July 10 last year, following a one-week siege of the sprawling compound after violent clashes between Islamic militants and law enforcement officers.

Government officials said the all-out operation left around 100 people dead, but hard-line Islamists disputed the casualty figures, putting them at more than 3,000, largely women and children.

The students on Wednesday resolved to propagate Muslim rules in society for the glory of Islam, as they remembered radical cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who was killed in one of the seminary's basements during the attack.

Ghazi was the younger brother mosque administrator Maulana Abdul Aziz. The hard-line Muslim has been in the custody of security agencies since he was detained last year while trying to slip away dressed up in a full-body veil.

"This soil awaits (enforcement of an) Islamic system and justice," read a banner that fluttered across the perimeter fence that have replaced high concrete walls with watchtowers around the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque.

Authorities razed the multi-storyed Jamia Hafsa, mostly built on encroached state land, as well as the boundary walls and repainted the mosque in beige after the crackdown code-named "Operation Silence."

Speakers at Wednesday's so-called "Lal Masjid Martyrs Conference" blasted President Pervez Musharraf for purportedly ordering the raid at the behest of the United States, calling for his trial.

They vowed to carry forward Ghazi's mission and demanded reconstruction of the demolished seminary and release of the detained cleric. Girl students have already started attending symbolic open-air classes at the site of their religious school.

Aziz's wife, Umme Hassan, who also headed the seminary, said the "atrocities" committed at the mosque had no precedent in history.

She also asked the government to reopen a boys' seminary affiliated with the notorious mosque.

The protest meeting followed a similar assembly at the weekend in which firebrand Islamists said Musharraf should be hanged publicly.

Sunday's rally concluded in the evening without any violence but shortly afterwards a suspected suicide bomber struck a police cordon set up several hundred metres from the mosque, killing at least 19 people, including some passers-by.

The mosque stand-off and ensuing crackdown triggered a wave of bombings and suicide attacks, especially against government troops, which killed more than 4,000 people in the last year.

Most of the strikes are believed to have been ordered by the top Pakistani Taliban commander, Baitullah Mehsud, who had vowed to avenge the "murder of brothers and sisters." (dpa)