Team News Riveting
A middle-aged man was stoned to death by a mob over alleged desecration of the Holy Quran in a remote village of Khanewal district yesterday.
The killing comes on the heels of an identical incident that took place in Sialkot hardly two months ago, where a Sri Lankan engineer was lynched by factory workers on December 3 last year on blasphemy charges.
The Saturday incident took place in Jungle Dera village where hundreds of locals gathered after Maghrib prayers following announcements that a man had torn some pages of the Holy Quran and later set them on fire. The mob nabbed the man and brutally bashed him up before the police took him into their custody.
According to an eyewitness, a police team that reached the village well before stoning arrested the suspect but the irked mob snatched him from the officer’s custody. While the suspect reportedly claimed innocence, the villagers first hanged him with a tree and then hit him with bricks, until he died.
Prime Minister Imran Khan on Sunday took notice of a mob lynching incident in Khanewal over alleged desecration of the Holy Quran the previous night, saying “zero tolerance” would be shown to the perpetrators and action would be taken against police officials who “failed in their duty”.
