Furniture and other belongings of a church are set on fire, in Jaranwala, Pakistan August 16, 2023 in this screengrab obtained from a video by REUTERSPIX: Police were guarding a Christian neighbourhood in central Pakistan on Thursday, after hundreds of Muslim men rampaged through its streets setting fire to churches and ransacking homes over accusations of blasphemy a day earlier.
“The desecration of the Holy Quran has been made and emotions of the Muslims have been injured. An order has been issued for the arrest of the accused,“ a statement said. “They broke the windows, doors and took out fridges, sofas, chairs and other household items to pile them up in front of the church to be burnt. They also burnt and desecrated Bibles, they were ruthless,“ he told AFP by phone.
“Christians have desecrated the Holy Koran. All the clerics, all the Muslims should unite and gather in front of the mosque. Better to die if you don’t care about Islam,“ one cleric is heard saying.Blasphemy is a sensitive issue in Muslim-majority Pakistan, where anyone deemed to have insulted Islam or Islamic figures can face the death penalty.
Christians, who make up around two percent of the population, occupy one of the lowest rungs in Pakistani society and are frequently targeted with spurious and unfounded blasphemy allegations that can be used to settle personal vendettas.Politicians have been assassinated, lawyers murdered and students lynched over accusations of blasphemy.
In one of Pakistan's most high-profile cases, Christian woman Asia Bibi was at the centre of a decade-long blasphemy row, which eventually saw her death sentence overturned and ended with her fleeing the country.
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