A mob broke into a Pakistani police station and burnt a man accused of desecrating the Koran alive, police said Saturday, in the latest violence focusing attention on the country's blasphemy laws.
The man was a traveler and had spent Thursday night at the mosque, said Maulvi Memon, the imam in the southern village of Seeta in Sindh province. The charred remains of the Koran were found the next morning.
"He was alone in the mosque during the night," Memon said. "There was no one else there to do this terrible thing."
Villagers beat the man then handed him over to police. A few hours later, a crowd of around 200 stormed the police station, dragged the man out and set him on fire, said Usman Ghani, the senior superintendent of police in Dadu district.
Ghani said around 30 people had been arrested for the murder and seven police detained for negligence.
The Koran as fetish object: discuss. A question not likely to be coming to an anthropology paper near you any time soon.
[The Koran as fetish object: discuss with reference to Freud's theories on fetishism. A question definitely not coming to an anthropology paper near you any time soon:
In 1927, Sigmund Freud published his essay on "Fetishism," in which he writes that the meaning and purpose of the fetish turns out, through analysis, to always be the same: "the fetish is a substitute for the penis...for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost."]
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