RAWALPINDI: Pakistan Monday hanged the man who killed a provincial governor for seeking reform of the blasphemy law, angering supporters who had feted Mumtaz Qadri as a hero and threatened violence if he was executed.

Security was stepped up at flashpoints across the country including the garrison city of Rawalpindi where hundreds of supporters gathered at Qadri’s family home, as officials braced for protests.

Qadri, a police bodyguard to Salman Taseer, shot the Punjab governor 28 times at an Islamabad market in 2011.

He said he was angry at the politician’s calls to reform the blasphemy law.

Blasphemy is a hugely sensitive issue in the Islamic republic of some 200 million, and Qadri was hailed as a hero by many Pakistanis.

Analyst Hasan Askari said the next 24 hours would be “sensitive” for the government, adding that Islamabad had weighed the danger of mass violence against the need to “wash away the suspicion” of sympathy for militancy.

“Qadri was hanged in Adiala jail early Monday morning” in Rawalpindi, senior local police official Sajjid Gondal told AFP.

Mosques near Qadri’s family home in Rawalpindi broadcast the news, with cries heard from inside the house as hundreds of mourners arrived.

Paramilitary Ranger forces and police in riot gear as well as ambulances and dozens of police vehicles were stationed at the house early Monday.

But they had melted away by mid-morning, an AFP reporter said, leaving mourners forming a queue roughly a kilometer long to view the body on display at a nearby compound.

“I have no regrets,” Qadri’s brother Malik Abid told AFP, tears rolling down his cheeks, while women chanted nearby.

He said the family had been called to the prison Sunday evening by officials who said Qadri was unwell.

But when they arrived, Qadri received them with the news that authorities had deceived them and that his execution was imminent.

“We started crying, but he hugged us,” Abid said.

“I am proud of the martyrdom of my son,” Qadri’s father Bashir Awan told AFP.