Islamic mob burns to death an Ahmadi Muslim woman and two children in Gujranwala, Pakistan
A MOB burned to death a woman member of a religious sect and two of her granddaughters and burned down several homes after a sect member was accused of posting blasphemous material on Facebook.
Police in Pakistan said the homes and the dead, which included a seven-year-old girl and her baby sister, belonged to the minority Ahmadi Muslims in the country’s east. Nine other people were also badly burned, The International News reported.
The Ahmadiyya Islamic religious movement, which believes in a prophet after Mohammed, consider themselves Muslims but a 1984 Pakistani law declared them non-Muslims and many Pakistanis consider them heretics.
Police official Zeeshan Siddiqi said the rioting in the city of Gujranwala, 220km southeast of the capital, Islamabad, erupted late Sunday after claims that an Ahmadi had posted a blasphemous photo of the Kaaba — the cube-shaped structure in the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, that observant Muslims around the world face in prayer five times a day.
“Later, a crowd of 150 people came to the police station demanding the registration of a blasphemy case against the accused,” a police officer, who declined to be identified, told Reuters.
“As police were negotiating with the crowd, another mob attacked and started burning the houses of Ahmadis.”
The youth accused of making the Facebook post had not been injured, he said.
Siddiqi said the victims died of suffocation and that another woman miscarried during the riots and was in hospital.
Like other Pakistani minorities such as Christians, Hindu and Sikhs, Ahmadis have long been targeted by Islamic extremists.
Originally published as Muslims burn to death three girls
