The export director of a company in Sialkot was accused of having offended Prophet Muhammad. Hundreds watched, chanted, and took pictures.
by Massimo Introvigne
On December 3, a mob of Muslim extremists entered a factory in Sialkot, in Pakistan’s Punjab province, and seized and tortured to death its Sri Lankan export manager Priyantha Kumara after the rumor had spread that the man tore down posters with the name of Prophet Muhammad.
The mob chanted slogans, and many took pictures and videos of the lynching, sharing them on the social media. The body of the manager was then carried outside the factory and publicly burned, again with hundreds celebrating and taking videos.
Videos shared on Twitter show clearly that local police were present, and did not prevent the outrage.
The incident came a week after a Muslim mob burned a police station and four police posts in Charsadda, a district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, northwest Pakistan, after officers refused to hand over a mentally unstable man accused of desecrating a copy of the Quran whom the extremists wanted to lynch.
The chief minister of Punjab, Usman Buzdar, tweeted that he was “shocked” by the incident and that those responsible will be punished. Religious minorities remain skeptical, as in too many similar cases hate crimes have not been followed by punishment.
Saifur Mulook, the senior lawyer who represented Asia Bibi, the Christian woman who had been falsely accused of blasphemy, before the Supreme Court, stated that the police present at the incident should also be arrested as “co-murderers.”
