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Mass rally against Qu'ran abuse
27/05/2005 16:32 - (SA)
Sami Zubeiri
Islamabad - Thousands of Islamic hardliners launched fresh protests across Pakistan on Friday after the United States admitted some guards at Guantanamo Bay had mishandled the Qu'ran, witnesses and party officials said.
Armed and mounted police as well as anti-terrorist commandos watched over several thousand people, including a number of women, who gathered outside the parliament building in Islamabad in response to a call by Islamic parties.
Demonstrators waving anti-US placards and banners also vented their anger in southern Karachi and eastern Lahore, Pakistan's two largest cities, and many other towns around the Islamic republic of 150 million people.
The demonstrations came a day after visiting US assistant secretary of state Christina Rocca assured Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf the US would take action if anyone was found guilty of abusing the holy book.
"The US is indulging in desecration of the Koran as part of its anti-Islam policy," Qazi Hussain Ahmed, chief of main Islamic fundamentalist party Jamaat-i-Islami and a senior member of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal alliance of religious parties, told the rally in the capital.
Ahmed said an earlier bomb blast at a Muslim shrine near Islamabad earlier on Friday which left at least 19 people dead was "exploded to divert attention from the protest against the United States and to trigger Sunni-Shiite violence."
Liaquat Baloch, deputy chief of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, said the alliance had also contacted Muslim organisations in 34 countries.
In neighbouring Indian-administered Kashmir, shops, schools and banks shut in a one-day strike called by Islamic parties, while several hundred Muslims protested outside the US embassy in Malaysia at the alleged abuse.
Shouted abuse
Back in Pakistan, about 2 000 protesters chanted anti-US slogans in Lahore while a crowd of 800 gathered in the southwestern city of Quetta where protesters trampled on a US flag, witnesses said.
Hundreds of Shiite Muslims gathered in politically volatile Karachi, shouting vitriolic abuse aimed at the US and Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf, who is a key ally in the what Washington calls its war on terror.
About 100 women clad in Muslim veils and waving placards took to the streets in Peshawar, the main town in deeply conservative North West Frontier Province. Pakistani opposition leader and Islamic radical Fazlur Rehman later addressed a large rally held in the city. Similar demonstrations were held in the central Pakistani cities of Multan, Bahawalpur and Dera Ghazi Khan, an where angry mob burnt American flags and effigies of President George W Bush.
Protests erupted across Muslim world after a report in Newsweek magazine early this month that interrogators at the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, threw a Koran in a toilet to rattle Muslim inmates.
- AFP
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