By Zia Ur Rehman

KARACHI — The entrance to the district police headquarters in southern Pakistan was carpeted with rose petals, a grand gesture of respect. A crowd filled the air with chants of Islamic slogans. Many carried garlands and flower bouquets to laud the officers for their actions.

The throngs were ecstatic because the police had killed a man. His supposed crime: “blasphemous content” on social media.

The man, a 36-year-old government doctor, had been shot “unintentionally” as he resisted arrest, authorities claimed. But human rights groups called it an extrajudicial killing, the second such one in a week. On Sept. 12, a 52-year-old man in custody on suspicion of blasphemy was shot dead inside a police station in southwestern Pakistan.

The cases have reverberated across the nation, highlighting the volatile nature of Pakistan’s religious landscape. Blasphemy, a legal offence that can carry the death penalty, has long been a sensitive issue in a country that is more than 96% Muslim. Even a mere accusation can be deadly; mobs sometimes lynch people before their cases can go to trial.

Rights activists have expressed concerns over the government’s tolerance of hard-line Islamist groups and over surging violence among their supporters after blasphemy allegations. The killings of the two men this month have ignited fears that the police, pressured by the mob actions, may now be taking matters into their own hands, too.

“The Pakistani police force is a deeply conservative institution, mirroring the broader societal challenges in the country,” said Zoha Waseem, a policing expert at the University of Warwick in Britain. The killings, she said, raise “serious concerns about the ability to fairly address hate crimes and curb lynch mobs in blasphemy-related cases in the future”.

The doctor who was killed, Shah Nawaz, was accused of “desecrating” the Prophet Muhammad with a post on Facebook. He went into hiding, fearing for his life. Nawaz was dismissed from his job and faced blasphemy charges after a cleric filed a police complaint.

Islamist political parties organized violent protests demanding his immediate arrest, despite Nawaz’s insistence that he had not written the post on his account, which had long been dormant. One cleric even publicly announced an $18,000 bounty on his head, declaring that the punishment for blasphemy was beheading.

Nawaz’s family said he voluntarily surrendered to the police in Sindh province, hoping to avoid the fate of others lynched by mobs. A minister in the provincial government from Nawaz’s hometown confirmed that Nawaz was in police custody.

However, on the night of Sept. 18, the police claimed that Nawaz had been killed as they tried to arrest him.

Nawaz’s family vehemently denied the police’s account, asserting that he had been murdered in what is known in South Asia as an “encounter”,  in which officers kill a person and invent a story about having acted in self-defence during a shootout.

“Police breached our trust and killed Nawaz while he was in their custody, instead of bringing him before a court of law,” said his brother, Babar Kumbhar.

The aftermath of Nawaz’s death was marked by further violence. When his family tried to bury his body on their private land under the cover of darkness, after being denied burial at a graveyard, a mob armed with weapons and Molotov cocktails chased them, seized the body and set it on fire.

The mob’s actions set off public outrage, as did videos of the rose-petal celebrations at the police station. The provincial government suspended officers who had been involved in Nawaz’s case and started an investigation.

Islamist groups threatened protests against the government’s actions, hailing the police officers as heroes for “defending Islam”.

A week before Nawaz’s death, a police officer in Balochistan province, in Pakistan’s southwest, killed Abdul Ali, a shopkeeper, while he was in custody. Ali had been accused of using objectionable words against the Prophet Muhammad. He had been transferred to a more secure facility because of growing demands that he be handed over to a mob so they could kill him.

A police officer posing as a relative of Ali’s gained access to the station and shot him. Since then, the family of the officer, who has been arrested, has been receiving visitors offering praise for the killing of Ali.

Pakistan inherited 19th-century British laws outlining punishments for blasphemy-related offences. In the 1980s, the government revamped those laws to add harsh penalties for those who insult Islam.

Last year, the nation passed a law to increase the punishment for derogatory remarks against revered personalities — including the Prophet Muhammad’s family, wives and companions, and the first four caliphs — to at least 10 years of imprisonment, up from three.

The Centre for Social Justice, a minority rights group in Lahore, Pakistan, reported that at least 330 people, mostly Muslims, were charged in 180 blasphemy cases last year.

Although Pakistan has never executed anyone for blasphemy, mob killings and other violence are another matter.

In recent years, police stations have been burned after officers refused to hand over blasphemy suspects to mobs, and groups have stormed stations to try to lynch accused individuals.

In June, a mob broke into a police station in the Swat Valley, in northwestern Pakistan, and snatched a man who had been detained there after being accused of desecrating the Quran. The attackers lynched the man and burned down the station.

In May, the police rescued a Christian man from a mob in Sarghoda, a district in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, after allegations that he had deliberately burned pages of the Quran. A week later, he died from injuries suffered in the attack.

In February, a female police officer in Lahore rescued a woman from an attack by a mob that had mistaken the Arabic script on her dress for Quranic verses.

Last year, eight people accused of blasphemy were killed extra-judicially, primarily by mobs with insufficient intervention from the police and other authorities, the Centre for Social Justice reported. This year, the number of such deaths has risen to eight with the two killings this month.

With fear rising after the recent killings, many in Pakistan are posting disclaimers on social media stating that any offensive content on their accounts was not posted by them.

Experts and rights activists attribute the surge in blasphemy-related violence to the rise of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, or TLP, a radical Islamist party. The organization was initially formed to demand the release of Mumtaz Qadri, a police officer who assassinated Punjab’s governor, Salman Taseer, in 2011 over proposed changes to the blasphemy law.

In April 2021, the TLP organized violent countrywide protests demanding the expulsion of the French ambassador after President Emmanuel Macron of France eulogized a French teacher murdered for showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a classroom.

Rabia Mehmood, a Lahore-based researcher who studies blasphemy-related violence, said the Pakistani government’s tolerance of the TLP’s supporters and groups defending the country’s blasphemy laws had fostered a climate conducive to extrajudicial violence.

“This sends a message that no one is safe from the wrath of blasphemy vigilantes, far-right lawyers or law enforcement personnel on the hunt for victims of fabricated blasphemy cases,” she said.

-New York Times