Lal Masjid’s former chief cleric Maulana Abdul Aziz filed an application in the Supreme Court on Monday requesting that former president Pervez Musharraf be placed on the Exit Control List (ECL).

The application, filed by Aziz’s lawyer Advocate Tariq Asad, maintained that Musharraf was a prime suspect in the Lal Masjid operation and is wanted by the government in several cases.The Lal Masjid commission has also issued notices to Musharraf four times to appear before it, the application stated.

The former president, who ended his self-exile on Sunday, was involved in a number of cases in the courts relating to the assassination of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader Benazir Bhutto, the death of baloch tribal head Nawab Akbar Bugti and the incident of the Lal Masjid.

On July 3, 2007, Musharraf had ordered a military operation against the mosque for challenging the writ of the state. The military besieged the mosque for 12 days before assaulting the compound, an attack in which hundreds of students were killed.

The former chief cleric of Lal Masjid was accused of using the mosque loudspeaker to instigate madrassa students to attack the Rangers who were deployed outside the mosque in order to prevent Aziz and his associates at Lal Masjid from continuing their campaign of public intimidation that they had been carrying out since January of that year.

The charges against Aziz also include kidnapping and abduction of Chinese massage therapists as well as hijacking a children’s library in June 2007 as part of his institution’s protest against the demolition of seven mosques in the federal capital.Last year, an anti-terrorism court acquitted Aziz, and 16 other persons in a case on the killing of a Rangers official