The Red Mosque itself was being renovated and "we hope to re-open it on Friday" in time for traditional Islamic prayers, said city official Kamran Lashari. Reports have said the mosque will be repainted green.

The Jamia Hafsa school, which authorities said was built illegally in the first place, is to be knocked down because the fierce clashes on July 10-11 and the preceding week-long siege rendered it unsafe.

"Our engineering experts have declared the building dangerous and it will be demolished," Lashari, chairman of Islamabad's government-run Capital Development Authority, told AFP.

"The building is badly damaged as a result of the massive action," he said.

The sprawling school was left a smoking shell riddled with bullet holes after the assault on Islamic militants holed up inside. Some parts of the building were blown up while others were set on fire.

Lashari added that the demolition of the living quarters used by the head cleric Abdul Aziz and his brother Abdul Rashid Ghazi was already under way.

Aziz was captured trying to flee the mosque in a woman's burka while Ghazi was shot dead in the raid. Eleven soldiers and more than 75 people inside the mosque compound, most of them militants, were killed in the operation.

Pakistani authorities on Sunday discovered an unidentified body and a Kalashnikov assault rifle in the basement of the complex as government labourers carried out repairs.

A wave of militant revenge attacks for the storming of the mosque has claimed more than 200 lives, most of them security forces, and piled pressure on President Pervez Musharraf to tackle Islamic extremism.