An angry mob has stoned a man in a remote village in eastern Pakistan for allegedly setting fire to a Quran in a mosque yesterday. An employee of the mosque said he saw the man do this.
According to a police spokesman, the mosque employee first told others what he had seen before informing the police. The police would have arrived quickly, but the man was already surrounded by an angry mob. When the officers tried to take him, people started throwing stones. A number of officers were also injured.
The man would have set fire to at least one Quran and wanted to light another. People, meanwhile, were arriving for evening prayers and would have yelled for him to stop.
Missing for days
Before reinforcements arrived at the mosque, the man had already died and his body had been hung from a tree. According to witnesses, the police were on site before the stoning started, but the crowd managed to get the man out of the hands of the officers. They tried to save him, but the officers who did were beaten.
The victim was from a nearby village. The local police chief tells the AP news agency that he was not mentally well. “According to his family, he was often missing for days, begging and eating everything he could find.” His body has since been handed over to the family.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan tweeted that his country has “zero tolerance” for people who “take the law into their own hands”. Action is being taken against the perpetrators of the lynching.
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