Islamabad: An enraged mob stoned to death a middle-aged man for allegedly desecrating the Quran in a remote village in eastern Pakistan, police said. The custodian of a local mosque said he saw the man burning the Quran inside the building and told others, according to police spokesman Chaudhry Imran.
The violence took place in a village in Punjab province. PM Imran Khan expressed anguish over the incident and said that the perpetrators will be dealt with strictly under the law. He tweeted: “We have zero tolerance for anyone taking the law into their own hands and lynching incidents will be dealt with full severity of law. Have asked the Punjab police chief for a report on the action taken.”
According to police, the mob accused a man named Mushtaq of burning pages of the Quran and around 200-300 people tied him up to a tree before killing him by throwing stones and bricks at him and then beating him with rods. “They hung his body from a tree,” the police report said.
Munawar Gujjar of a local police station said the man had been mentally unstable for the last 15 years and according to his family often went missing from home for days. Police official Imran said cops rushed to the scene, where the man was found surrounded by a mob. The police team tried to take custody of the man but the group began throwing stones, injuring the officers. Police have identified 33 suspects and about 80 people had been detained.
Mob attacks scholar
In another case, an enraged mob attacked and injured a Shia scholar for allegedly burning the pages of a religious book in Pakistan’s Punjab province. Dozens of people carrying clubs, bricks and other objects surrounded the house of the scholar in Tandlianwala, Faislabad district, some 180 km from Lahore, over blasphemy allegations. However, police reached at the spot and rescued him. The police shifted him to an undisclosed location. His family was also relocated to another area for safety reasons. The province has witnessed two deaths related to mob lynching in the past two months.
