quetta/islamabad — A police officer in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province shot and killed a man Thursday who was being held in custody on blasphemy allegations.
The fatal shooting happened inside a highly protected police station in the provincial capital of Quetta, a day after the victim, a Muslim, was arrested for allegedly making derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad.
A senior local police officer, Muhammad Baloch, told reporters that they had arrested the policeman involved in the shooting and registered a murder case against him. He did not name the detainee.
On Wednesday, witnesses reported that when the blasphemy suspect, Abdul Ali, was taken into custody in the Kharotabad neighborhood, a mob of dozens of residents quickly surrounded the police detention facility and demanded that he be handed over to them so they could kill him.
Police officials reported the protesters also had thrown a grenade at the building, but the resulting blast did not cause any casualties. They said the violence forced them to transfer Ali to the police station in the central garrison area of Quetta, where he was fatally shot “inside the lockup by an on-duty policeman” on Thursday.
Activists of a religious party later prevented Ali’s family from burying him in his hometown of Pishin, about 50 kilometers from Quetta, forcing those attempting to carry out the burial to flee the graveyard along with the body.
In Islamabad, the national capital, an Islamic party senator, Abdul Shakoor Khan, while speaking in the upper house of parliament, expressed solidarity with the alleged killer. Khan vowed to help get him a lawyer for his legal battle.
“We will not tolerate anyone issuing blasphemous remarks against the Holy Prophet,” Khan said.
Blasphemy is a highly sensitive issue in majority-Muslim Pakistan, where mere allegations have led to mobs lynching scores of suspects, even some in police custody. Insulting the Quran or Islamic beliefs is punishable by death under the country's blasphemy laws, though no one has ever been officially executed.
Thursday’s killing of a blasphemy suspect in custody by a police officer, however, is the first of its kind in Pakistan.
In early June, a 73-year-old Pakistani man from the minority Christian community died in a hospital a week after being violently attacked by a mob following blasphemy accusations in his native Sargodha district in central Punjab province.
Days later, on June 20, a Muslim man from Punjab was visiting the scenic Swat Valley in the northwestern Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa when a mob violently lynched him for allegedly desecrating Islam's holy book, the Quran.
Domestic and international rights groups have long sought reforms in the blasphemy laws, arguing they are often misused to settle personal vendettas or to target Pakistani minority communities.
Hundreds of suspects, mostly Muslims, are languishing in jails in Pakistan because of fear of retaliation from religious groups deters judges from moving their trials forward.
