Man lynched in Bangladesh for alleged Quran desecration

Al Jazeera
Fri, 30 Oct 2020 00:00 UTC

Anti-Macron demonstration

Man beaten to death and his body torched in northern Bangladesh after villagers accuse him of desecrating holy books kept in a mosque.

Hundreds of people in a Bangladeshi town have beaten and lynched a man who had allegedly desecrated the Muslim holy book, police said.

The crowd on Thursday seized two men who had been in official custody after they were accused of stepping on a Quran in the main mosque of Burimari in Lalmonirhat district, more than 300 kilometres (186 miles) northwest of the capital, Dhaka.

"They beat one man to death and then burnt the body," district police chief Abida Sultana told the AFP news agency.

Sultana said the two men told the imam at the mosque that hardline fighters might have stored illegal arms inside the building, the DPA news agency reported.

The two men then tried to search for the weapons on a shelf where the Quran and Hadith (sayings of Prophet Muhammad) were kept, in a way the imam found disrespectful to the holy books.

An altercation followed and the locals initially confined the two men to a room.

Several hundred people then rushed to the scene in the night and took away one of the men to a nearby area where they beat him and set his body on fire, said the officer.

Police recovered the charred body of the man, local government official Abu Newaz Nishat said.

The footage of the attack went viral on social media shortly after the incident.

The 35-year-old victim was reportedly struggling with psychological problems after he recently lost his job as a librarian at a college in neighbouring Rangpur district, Nishat said.

Police did not find any weapons at the mosque and the second man was taken into protective custody by the police.

Rumours and superstitions frequently lead to violent incidents in Bangladesh. More than 50 people were killed in mob beatings in 2019, according to rights watchdog, Ain o Salish Kendra.

The incident also came amid mounting anger in the Muslim-majority country over allegedly Islamophobic comments made by French President Emmanuel Macron.

Tens of thousands of people took part in anti-France rallies this week in the capital Dhaka and the port city of Chittagong, calling for a boycott of French products.

More demonstrations have been called on Friday after the weekly Muslim prayers.

Source : News Agencies

Reader Comments

Rowan Cocoan · 2020-10-30T18:51:19Z

How could anyone have thought Islam to be compatible to secular western values. Impossible. The PTB knew that and it was a part of tearing our society down. We fell into this period per Orwell's Nineteen Eight Four.

From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process-- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute--the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. (And it continued to do so for about 60 years after Orwell wrote that in 1948. We SOTTites were beneficiaries of that.)

The problem was that the Christian teachings which led to those values had educated the masses too well and risked having the controllers lose their position.

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable...

Orwell. Free at [Link]
R.C.

Bradly · 2020-10-31T06:24:49Z

The picture does not match the headline. The picture is of locals protesting Macron's comments.. not of the lynching as the headline implies.

Is this Sott's idea of offering an alternative to MSM..??

Rowan Cocoan · 2020-10-31T06:33:38Z

Bradly Good point. While the photo caption above does say what the image shows, the implication is there and that is the title.

I just went to the original at AJ, ( [Link] ) and the image there (now, at least) shows a Koran? (Is that forbidden?) It has Arabic?-looking script.

RC

Bradly · 2020-10-31T06:46:50Z

Rowan Cocoan Weird question you ask... in truth I don't know, I'm assuming it isn't.

Do you wan't it to be forbidden?.. maybe you're hoping it is..

Rowan Cocoan · 2020-10-31T06:49:30Z

Bradly No. I am the ultimate publish everything person. I detect you are misreading what I wrote. RC

Bradly · 2020-11-01T00:10:26Z

Bradly No. I am the ultimate publish everything person. I detect you are misreading what I wrote. RC

cool me too.. anyway i think those holy books are meant to read whether online or elsewhere.. so feel free

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Man lynched in Bangladesh for alleged Quran desecration

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