(adds Karachi protest, colour)

By Anwarullah Khan

KHAR, Pakistan, Nov 3 (Reuters) - Thousands of Pakistani tribesmen protested on Friday, vowing vengeance for an army airstrike on an al-Qaeda-linked religious school that killed around 80 suspected militants four days earlier.

Effigies of U.S. President George W. Bush and Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf were paraded through Khar, the main town in the Bajaur tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

Several thousand tribesmen gathered in Khar, just 10 km (six miles) from the destroyed madrasa, called Zia-ul-Koran or Light of the Koran in the village of Chenagai. The pro-Taliban cleric who ran it was killed in the raid.

"The people of the tribal areas are being treated like terrorists and innocent people are being killed by the U.S. and Pakistan army. We will not tolerate this anymore," Waheed Gul, a local Islamist leader from Jamaat-e-Islaami party, told protesters in Khar.

"We will certainly take revenge on these people," said another speaker, Zahir Shah.

At Nawagai, another town in Bajaur, tribesmen stoned government offices and burnt tribal police checkposts.

Along with North and South Waziristan, Bajaur is regarded as a hotbed of support for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

Protests also took place in many towns of North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Baluchistan, which adjoin Afghanistan.

In the NWFP capital of Peshawar a 1,000-strong crowd chanted "Shameless, Shameless Musharraf".

But, despite holding power in both provinces, Islamist parties failed to muster large-scale support outside the immediate border areas.

U.S. BLAMED

Islamist leaders and tribesmen say the airstrike was really carried out by a U.S. Predator drone aircraft, an allegation that both Pakistan and the United States have denied.

A CIA-operated drone aircraft carried out an attack last January in Bajaur that killed around 18 people, possibly including some al Qaeda operatives. But the main target of the attack, al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al Zawahri, was not there.

Zawahri had also visited the madrasa at Chenagai in the past, but not recently, and no senior militant figures were killed in the airstrike, Pakistani security officials said.

Musharraf says all those killed in the latest airstrike were militants, and the military released video footage shot from a surveillance aircraft showing rows of men doing physical exercises at the madrasa just an hour before the attack.

Protesters said the dead, mostly young men aged between 15 and 25, were merely students, although Pakistani security sources say they were being trained as suicide bombers to attack NATO, U.S., and Afghan forces across the border.

Some radicals used a protest in the NWFP town of Mansehra to rail against foreign aid agencies for promoting un-Islamic values while carrying out relief work after last year's earthquake.

In the southern city of Karachi, where many Pashtuns have migrated, some 3,000 tribal people held a rally demanding an end to army operations in their homeland.

Meanwhile, 8,000 members of Jamaat-u-Dawa, an Islamist charity that the United States says is a terrorist organisation, held prayers in Lahore for the airstrike's victims.

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