100s protest Qu'ran shooting
2008-05-26 14:40
Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan - Hundreds of university students demonstrated in northern Afghanistan on Monday in a new protest over a US soldier's shooting of a Qu'ran in Iraq and other alleged affronts to Islam.
About 800 students marched from Balkh university in Mazar-i-Sharif to the main mosque in the city centre chanting slogans against the "enemies of Islam" including the US and President George W Bush, an AFP reporter said.
"We strongly condemn the shooting of our holy book by an American soldier in Iraq. He must be hanged for that," said one of the protesters, Ahmad Nasir, a religious student.
The students tore an effigy of Bush to pieces and read out a resolution that demanded the execution of fellow student Parwiz Kambakhsh, a reporter sentenced to death in Balkh in January for alleged blasphemy.
Addressing the crowd, religious cleric Mawlawi Abdul Qahar said Westerners were insulting Islam.
"Muslims have never insulted or dishonoured the Torah or the Bible. Why do they insult our book?" he asked.
The US soldier who riddled a copy of the Qu'ran with bullets in Iraq in March was sent home for disciplinary action. Bush and the US military have apologised.
Protest turned violent
About 2 000 Afghans demonstrated against the incident in Afghanistan's remote central town of Chaghcharan on Thursday.
The protest turned violent and a Lithuanian soldier with NATO's International Security Assistance Force and two Afghan civilians were killed.
Kambakhsh, a 23-year-old Balkh university student and reporter, is appealing his conviction for blasphemy which came after he was accused of downloading from the internet and distributing articles said to question aspects of Islam.
His long-delayed appeal trial was on Sunday again adjourned for a week.
The Balkh demonstrators also referred to Abdul Rahman, an Afghan who was sentenced to death in 2006 for converting to Christianity. He was spirited out of Afghanistan and given asylum in Italy.
And they again condemned Danish cartoons first published two years ago that Muslims worldwide said insulted the Prophet Mohammad. Eleven Afghans were killed in demonstrations against the cartoons in 2006.