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Hindus are the biggest non-Muslim spiritual group in Pakistan, which gained independence from British rule in 1947, when the subcontinent was partitioned into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India.
Movies made by locals on the scene and shared with Reuters confirmed a crowd breaking up blocks of the temple construction’s partitions utilizing stones and sledgehammers, as darkish smoke from a big hearth billowed into the sky.
Native Muslim clerics had organized what they instructed police could be a peaceable protest towards the alleged growth of the temple, situated in a city in Karak district, in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Rahmatullah Wazir, a police officer within the city, instructed Reuters.
He added that clerics main the protest began “provocative speeches,” following which the gang attacked the temple.
“It was a mob after which no one was there to cease them from damaging the temple,” Wazir stated, including that a lot of the construction had been broken.
District police chief Irfanullah Khan instructed Reuters 9 individuals had been arrested on suspicion of collaborating within the assault.
The temple was first constructed within the early 1900s as a shrine, however the native Hindu group left in 1947 and by 1997 the location had been taken over by native Muslims.
In 2015, Pakistan’s Supreme Court docket ordered or not it’s handed again to the Hindu group and the shrine rebuilt, given that it will not be expanded sooner or later.
The spokesman of the provincial authorities didn’t reply to Reuters’ requests for remark.
“It is a barbaric option to take care of minorities. We’re shocked and damage … and (the incident has) despatched a wave of insecurity in Hindu group,” Haroon Sarbdyal, an area chief of the Hindu group, stated in an interview.
Sarbdyal stated whereas native Hindus had relocated from the village, devotees nonetheless traveled there each Thursday to go to the shrine.
Pakistan’s Minister for Human Rights Shireen Mazari condemned the incident on Twitter.
Earlier this yr, rights watchdog Amnesty Worldwide referred to as on Pakistani authorities to “defend the correct to freedom of faith and perception for the nation’s beleaguered Hindu group, together with the development of temples to train that proper.”
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