ISLAMABAD, 28 May 2005 — Thousands launched fresh protests across Pakistan yesterday after the United States admitted some guards at Guantanamo Bay had mishandled the Qur’an, 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 Qur’an as part of its anti-Islam policy,” Qazi Hussain Ahmed, chief of Jamaat-i-Islami party and a senior member of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal alliance, told the rally in the capital.
Liaquat Baloch, deputy chief of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, said the alliance had also contacted Muslim organisations in 34 countries.
In neighboring Indian-admninistered 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.
Back in Pakistan, some 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 vitrolic abuse aimed at the United States and Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf.
About 100 women waving placards took to the streets in Peshawar, the main town in deeply conservative North West Frontier Province. A large rally held in the city later was addressed by Pakistani opposition leader Fazlur Rehman.
Similar demonstrations were held in the central Pakistani cities of Multan, Bahawalpur and Dera Ghazi Khan, an where angry mob burned 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 center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, threw a Qur’an in a toilet to rattle Muslim inmates.
Meanwhile, shops, schools and banks were shut yesterday in Indian-administered Kashmir and women activists burnt a US flag in the protest rallies, witnesses said.
The one-day strike in Kashmir was called by hard-line separatist leader Syed Ali Geelani and backed by the revolt-hit region’s leading women’s separatist group, Dukhtaran-e-Milat or Daughters of Faith.
