Pakistan’s police force have arrested 50 villagers in the eastern town of Kot Radha Kishan in relation to the lynching of a Christian couple for allegedly desecrating pages of the Quran.
Shama, a 25-year-old pregnant mother of three, and her husband Shahzad were burned to death inside the furnace at the Yousaf brick kiln where they worked.
Shama was reportedly clearing out some of the belongings of her recently deceased father-in-law when she burned some of his belongings at the kiln, including a number of papers. She is illiterate, and was unaware that some of the papers were from a Quran.
A vendor at the kiln found some scraps of burnt pages from the Quran and showed them to to the villagers on Tuesday morning. Within hours a mob of hundreds of villagers tore apart the room where the couple had taken shelter, and then tortured them before burning them alive in the kiln’s furnace, with listening to Shama’s pleas that she was unaware of the pages’ significance, according to Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper
Five policemen attempted to help the couple, but their attempts were thwarted by the crowd.
The police First Information Report (FIR) alleges that dozens of people, including the kiln owner and his staff, used mosques’ loudspeakers in the villages of Chak 59, Chak 60, Chak Rossa and Chak Bhail to incite the villagers to violence against the couple, and Kasur District Police Officer Jawad Qamar confirmed to Dwn that a local religious leader “fanned the issue”.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) said that it is “shocked and saddened beyond words by the callous murder of the couple and their unborn child” and claimed that the murders stemmed from a disagreement over money between the kiln owner and Shahzad.