A 41-year-old man has been stoned to death by a mob for allegedly desecrating the Koran inside a mosque in a village in eastern Pakistan, police have said.

Three police officers also were injured, and more than 80 men have been detained after the incident on Saturday evening in the Khanewal district of Punjab province.

The mosque’s custodian said he saw the man burning the Muslim holy book and told others before informing police, according to a spokesman.

Police rushed to the mosque and found the man surrounded by an angry crowd.

Officer Mohammad Iqbal and two other police personnel tried to take custody of the man, but the group began throwing stones at them, seriously injuring Mr Iqbal and slightly injuring the other two officers.

Munawar Gujjar, chief of Tulamba police station, said he rushed reinforcements to the mosque but they were not in time to stop the mob stoning the man to death before hanging his body from a tree.

The victim was named as Mushtaq Ahmed, 41, who was from a nearby village.

“The ill-fated man has been mentally unstable for the last 15 years and according to his family often went missing from home for days begging and eating whatever he could find,” he said.

Mr Ahmed’s body has been returned to his family.

Police have so far detained about 80 men living in the mosque’s surroundings, but around 300 suspects are said to have taken part in the stoning.

Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan expressed his anguish over the stoning, and said he was seeking a report from Punjab’s chief minister on the police handling of the case. He said they had “failed in their duty”.

“We have zero tolerance for anyone taking the law into their own hands and mob lynching will be dealt with with the full severity of the law,” Mr Khan said in a tweet hours after the incident.

The prime minister also asked the Punjab police chief for a report on the actions taken against perpetrators of the lynching.

The killing comes months after the lynching of a Sri Lankan manager of a sporting goods factory in Sialkot in Punjab province on December 3 who was accused by workers of blasphemy.

International and national rights groups say blasphemy accusations have often been used to intimidate religious minorities and settle personal scores. It is a crime punishable by death in Pakistan.

The Home Secretary has said politicians will not be “cowed” following the fatal stabbing of MP Sir David Amess, which police believe may be linked to Islamist extremism.

Priti Patel visited the scene at Belfairs Methodist Church in Leigh-on-Sea on Saturday morning alongside Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle to pay their respects to Sir David, less than 24 hours after he was killed at a constituency surgery.

Ms Patel said security measures were being put in place to protect MPs but vowed they will carry on serving the country unimpeded in the face of the attack, which the Metropolitan Police have declared was a terrorist incident.

Speaking at Southend Police Station, the Home Secretary said: “We will carry on, we live in an open society, a democracy. We cannot be cowed by any individual or any motivation… to stop us from functioning, to serve our elected democracy.”

Asked whether there could be a balance between the safety of MPs and the democratic process, she said: “It can be balanced, it can absolutely be balanced.”

Ms Patel said Sir David was “was killed doing a job that he loves, serving his own constituents as an elected democratic member and, of course, acts of this… are absolutely wrong, and we cannot let that get in the way of our functioning democracy.”

“So that is why there are measures under way right now – I convened meetings yesterday, I’ve been with the Speaker of the House, and with the police and our security services to make sure that all measures are being put in place for the security of MPs so that they can carry on with their duties as elected democratic members,” she added.

Sir David, 69, who had been an MP since 1983, was fatally injured while meeting constituents.

A 25-year-old man arrested at the scene on suspicion of murder is in custody at an Essex police station.

Official sources told the PA news agency the man is believed to be a British national with Somali heritage.

As part of the investigation, officers are also carrying out searches at two addresses in the London area, the Met said.

Scotland Yard said the country’s most senior counter-terror officer, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Dean Haydon, has formally declared the incident as terrorism and said early investigations have revealed “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”.

Politicians put on a united front at the church on Saturday morning, with Mr Johnson and Sir Keir individually laying flowers outside the building.

But MPs have raised concerns over their safety at constituency surgeries following the attack, sparking a debate over whether they should continue in person.

Veteran Labour MP Harriet Harman said she will be writing to the Prime Minister asking him to back a Speaker’s Conference to review the safety of parliamentarians.

Tory MP Tobias Ellwood, who was hailed as a hero for his attempts to save the life of Pc Keith Palmer during the Westminster terror attack in 2017, said face-to-face meetings with MPs should be paused until a security review has been completed.

Investigators believe Sir David’s killer acted alone and are not seeking anyone else in connection with his death.

According to reports, the knifeman was waiting among a group of people to see Sir David at the church and launched the attack shortly after the MP arrived.

Local councillor John Lamb told the PA news agency he dashed to the church when he heard Sir David had been “stabbed multiple times”.

He said: “David was there holding his surgery at that Methodist church and this person had gone there to join the surgery and when he got the chance and he went in to be seen by David, then he drew a knife and stabbed him.”

By the time Mr Lamb arrived, police cordons were up and he could not get into the church.

He said: “We knew it must be very serious because the paramedics had been working on Sir David for over two-and-a-half hours and they hadn’t got him on the way to hospital. We knew it had to be extremely serious and that the worst scenario could occur – we were hoping it wouldn’t but it did. That was when we heard that he had died.”

The Conservative councillor said a worker from Sir David’s office who was in the surgery during the attack was “not in touch at the moment because it’s so distressing, she’s getting counselling at the moment”.

Mr Lamb previously told the Daily Mail that Sir David was with two female members of staff – one from his constituency office and one from his parliamentary office – when a man “literally got a knife out and just began stabbing him”.

Chief Constable of Essex Police Ben-Julian Harrington said Southend West MP Sir David was “simply dispensing his duties when his life was horrifically cut short”.

Tory veteran Sir David, who was described by Mr Johnson as “one of the kindest, nicest, most gentle people in politics” was married with five children.

The attack came five-and-a-half years after Labour MP Jo Cox was killed by a far-right extremist in her Batley and Spen constituency in West Yorkshire.

The murder of Pawel Adamowicz, the mayor of the Polish city Gdansk, should send shockwaves trembling through Europe. It should also be a wake-up call about where toxic political discourse is taking us.

Adamwicz, a liberal mayor known for his vociferous and uncompromising defence of migrants, refugees, women and LGBT rights, was stabbed at a charity concert. His assailant is a 27-year-old with a record of violent crime and after the stabbing supposedly told the crowd he blamed Adamwicz’s former political party for his jailing in 2014.

Adamwicz was abhorred by the far-right for his socially liberal outlook and while no evidence exists implicating far-right motivations for the attack, it’s understood that Poland has experienced a rise in social tensions and increasing normalisation of hate speech.

Europe’s liberal values is under siege and though many would like to assume the pressure is being exclusively applied externally from reactionary Islamist movements and regimes, it also exists at home with the intolerance and bigotry of the far-right. Increasingly they have shown themselves not averse to assaulting liberal politicians or threatening them with such.

Politics has polarised society and created these divides in which those belonging to the other side are traitors and not worth reconnecting with. The politics of community and solidarity, in which we build common bonds with each other has been lost. It would be foolish to deny this issue does not exist on the left given the increasing bouts of anti-Semitism as well as the growing disconnect with blue-collar workers across many western societies. But the discourse around migrants and refugees, in painting them as threats to civilization has facilitated the targeting of liberal activists and politicians as traitors for risking national security by opening the borders to these people.

Britain has seen the dangerous consequences of allowing unchecked right-wing populist language to pervade our politics. The murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right sympathizer cannot be seen in isolation from her staunch defence of immigration. Her words, “more in common” have been immortalised in migrant campaigning, but it’s a reminder of how language matters. The People’s Vote campaign is technocratic, elitist and disconnected from the blue-collar working-class communities of the north which have been left behind by globalisation as London has enjoyed excess prosperity. But that does not excuse the terrible language around Anna Soubry which led to her harrowing abuse as she was essentially harassed by a far-right mob led by James Goddard.

Even if you were prepared to ignore this, you cannot ignore the hate crime that rose after Brexit, aimed at EU migrants and Muslims. These were not small spurts but astronomical spikes that was all about generating a hostile environment for minorities. The EU referendum had been toxic in its depiction of immigration and the far-right was euphoric in its abuse.

This is about remembering the basic principle of human rights, democracy and civil liberty, and how they work as the moral trident governing our political systems. But the far-right has threatened this repeatedly, abusing our democracy, seeking to undermine our commitment to human rights and liberties, and in doing so have contributed to the moral decline in our political discourse. They are content to watch children drown off boats fleeing war and will harangue anyone who makes a defence of that.

There are some who have sought to use the shadow of the far-right hanging over our politics as an argument against another referendum on Brexit. They might, shamelessly, cite Adamowicz’s murder as proof of that. But it’s clear the far-right will behave abusively whatever the outcome. The murder of a popular liberal politician in Poland should convey a warning to everyone that we must reel in our discourse because it has strayed too far into toxicity. It is fertilising Europe with hatred against minorities and those who seek to defend them.

In times like this we should celebrate those who have a steadfast commitment to human rights. We should be glad for charities like Action Aid, Afghanistan and Central Asian Association, Refugee Action and others who seek to make new homes for asylum seekers and help them connect with new communities. This is the best defence of our human rights.

Article by Rabbil Sikdar

Every few weeks, Susan Bro walks down 4th Street in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, until she gets to a brick wall covered in chalked messages like “Love over hate” and “Gone but not forgotten.”

“I come just to absorb the energy of the place,” Bro, 61, said on Tuesday as she stood on the block now named for her daughter, Heather Heyer, who was killed a year ago while marching against a white supremacist rally.

Since August 12, 2017, when James Fields rammed his car into counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heyer and injuring several others, Bro has channelled her rage and grief into spreading the same message that drew her daughter downtown that day.

Bro said she made a promise to her daughter at her funeral, when she saw her bruised, broken body for the first time and broke down in tears.

“I held her hand and said, ‘I’m going to make this count.'”

Heyer’s death capped a day of clashes after hundreds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and others descended upon the city, drawing national attention to the “alt right” movement that had grown bolder since President Donald Trump’s election.

Trump faced intense criticism after the protests when he seemed to equate the white nationalists with the counter-protesters, saying there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Bro said she chose not to return several phone calls from the White House after learning of the president’s remarks.

As the city prepares for the first anniversary of the so-called “Unite the Right” rally, Bro is readying herself for another difficult milestone in a year full of painful moments without Heather.

“The ‘firsts’ are always hardest,” she said, her voice cracking. “I got through the others: Mother’s Day, her birthday, Christmas. This will be the last one.”

Bro said she would bring flowers to Heather Heyer Way on August 12 before speaking at an event to mark the anniversary.

Law enforcement agencies have made extensive plans to combat any potential violence, though the leader of last year’s gathering, local white nationalist Jason Kessler, failed to secure a permit for a sequel this year. Instead, he has obtained a permit to hold a rally in Washington outside the White House.

Before last summer, Bro, a former elementary schoolteacher, led a relatively quiet life, doing secretarial work and living in a modest trailer home about 30 minutes north of Charlottesville.

At Heyer’s memorial service, which drew nearly 2,000 mourners and was broadcast live on large screens, Bro said the national response to the tragedy was “just the beginning of Heather’s legacy.”

“They tried to kill my child to shut her up. Well guess what? You just magnified her,” she said, drawing a standing ovation.

Within weeks of Heyer’s death, Bro created the Heather Heyer Foundation, in part to install a formal and legal structure to handle the hundreds of thousands of dollars in funds that poured in from sympathizers around the country.

Bro runs the foundation from her home and from an office at a Charlottesville law firm, filled with tributes to Heyer that she has received over the last year: a portrait painted by an artist, a humanitarian award given posthumously by the Muhammad Ali Center, notes written by Heyer’s friends at her memorial service.

The foundation has organised a scholarship programme and is planning to launch a social justice youth programme.

Bro found herself making appearances on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show and at MTV’s Video Music Awards. She acknowledged that the intense media attention has caused resentment among some activists in Charlottesville who feel the focus on Heyer, a white woman, has distracted from the racial issues at the core of the clashes.

It has been a bit of a balancing act, she said, to amplify Heyer’s message without making it seem as though her daughter was the only victim who mattered. She noted that violence against black people often does not generate the same level of interest and warned against the “white-centred” narrative that portrayed Heyer as a leader rather than simply one of many people who decided to march.

“The issues have not changed,” Bro said. “We still have police shootings, over-policing, a lack of affordable housing, the prison pipeline.”

A year after burying her daughter, Bro reflected on the activism that brought Heyer to the protests.

“The point of Heather’s death is that we have a responsibility to rise up to address that hate,” Bro said. “Don’t sit by and wring your hands.”

Egyptian fighter jets carried out strikes on Friday directed at camps in Libya which Cairo says have been training militants who killed dozens of Christians earlier in the day.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said he had ordered strikes against what he called terrorist camps, declaring in a televised address that states that sponsored terrorism would be punished.

Egyptian military sources said six strikes took place near Derna in eastern Libya at around sundown, hours after masked gunmen attacked a group of Coptic Christians travelling to a monastery in southern Egypt, killing 29 and wounding 24.

The Egyptian military said the operation was ongoing and had been undertaken once it had been ascertained that the camps had produced the gunmen behind the attack on the Coptic Christians in Minya, southern Egypt, on Friday morning.

“The terrorist incident that took place today will not pass unnoticed,” Sisi said. “We are currently targeting the camps where the terrorists are trained.”

He said Egypt would not hesitate to carry out further strikes against camps that trained people to carry out operations against Egypt, whether those camps were inside or outside the country.

Egyptian military footage of pilots being briefed and war planes taking off was shown on state television.

East Libyan forces said they participated in the air strikes, which had targeted forces linked to al-Qaeda at a number of sites, and would be followed by a ground operation.

A resident in Derna heard four powerful explosions, and told Reuters that the strikes had targeted camps used by fighters belonging to the Majlis al-Shura militant group.

Majlis al-Shura spokesman Mohamed al-Mansouri said in a video posted online that the Egyptian air strikes did not hit any of the group’s camps, but instead hit civilian areas.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack on the Christians, which followed a series of church bombings claimed by Islamic State in a campaign of violence against the Copts.

Islamic State supporters reposted videos from earlier this year urging violence against the Coptsin Egypt.

At a nearby village, thousands later attended a funeral service that turned into an angry protest against the authorities’ failure to protect Christians.

“We will avenge them or die like them,” mourners said, while marching with a giant wooden cross.

GUNFIRE AND BLOOD

Eyewitnesses said masked men opened fire after stopping the Christians, who were in a bus and other vehicles on a desert road. Local TV channels showed a bus apparently raked by gunfire and smeared with blood.

Clothes and shoes could be seen lying in and around the bus, while the bodies of some of the victims lay in the sand nearby, covered with black sheets.

Eyewitnesses said three vehicles were attacked. First to be hit was a vehicle taking children to the monastery as part of a church-organised trip, and another vehicle taking families there.

The gunmen boarded the vehicles and shot all the men and took all the women’s gold jewellery. They then shot women and children in the legs.

When one of the gunmen’s vehicles got a flat tire they stopped a truck carrying Christian workers, shot them, and took the truck.

One of the gunmen recorded the attack on the Copts with a video camera, eyewitnesses said.

The attack took place on a road leading to the monastery of Saint Samuel the Confessor in Minya province, which is home to a sizeable Christian minority.

Security forces launched a hunt for the attackers, setting up dozens of checkpoints and patrols on the desert road.

Police armed with assault rifles formed a security perimeter around the attack site while officials from the public prosecutor’s office gathered evidence. Heavily armed special forces arrived later wearing face masks and body armour.

The injured were taken to local hospitals and some were being transported to Cairo. The Health Ministry said that among those injured were two children aged two.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who has made a point of improving relations with Cairo, said his country stood with Sisi and the Egyptian people.

“This merciless slaughter of Christians in Egypt tears at our hearts and grieves our souls,” Trump said.

The Grand Imam of al-Azhar, Egypt’s 1,000-year-old centre of Islamic learning, said the attack was intended to destabilise the country.

“I call on Egyptians to unite in the face of this brutal terrorism,” Ahmed al-Tayeb said. The Grand Mufti of Egypt, Shawki Allam, condemned the perpetrators as traitors.

The head of the Coptic Christian church, Pope Tawadros, who spoke with Sisi after the attack, said it was “not directed at the Copts, but at Egypt and the heart of the Egyptians”.

Pope Francis, who visited Cairo a month ago, described the attack as a “senseless act of hatred”.

ONGOING PERSECUTION

Coptic Christians, whose church dates back nearly 2,000 years, make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s population of 92 million.

They say they have long suffered from persecution, but in recent months the frequency of deadly attacks against them has increased. About 70 have been killed since December in bombings claimed by Islamic State at churches in the cities of Cairo, Alexandria and Tanta.

An Islamic State campaign of murders in North Sinai prompted hundreds of Christians to flee in February and March.

Copts fear they will face the same fate as brethren in Iraq and Syria, where Christian communities have been decimated by wars and Islamic State persecution.

Egypt’s Copts are vocal supporters of Sisi, who has vowed to crush Islamist extremism and protect Christians. He declared a three-month state of emergency in the aftermath of the church bombings in April.

But many Christians feel the state either does not take their plight seriously enough or cannot protect them against determined fanatics.

The government is fighting insurgents affiliated with Islamic State who have killed hundreds of police and soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula, while also carrying out attacks elsewhere in the country.

A mob in India beat to death two Muslims who were accused of trying to steal cows for slaughter, police say, the latest incident in a surge of violence blamed on hard-line Hindu groups. Samantha Vadas reports.

A brutal attack in India’s northeastern state of Assam.

A mob of 20 people beating two young Muslims to death with sticks after they were accused of plotting to steal cows for slaughter.

It’s the latest incident in a wave of violence being pinned on the country’s hard-line Hindus.

The religious group regard cows as sacred and many are demanding a ban on butchering them.

Those calls growing even louder over the past 3 years since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came into power.

Most Indian states have banned the slaughtering of cows, though the trade still operates unofficially in northern Uttar Pradesh where hard-line Hindu leader Yogi Adit-yanat has been leading a crackdown, which last month saw 45 thousand small meat shops shutdown in less than 24 hours – in some cases, through the use of violence.

Have you ever heard of the country that the United Kingdom is friendly with and where we overlook their human rights record?

Or have you heard about the country that sentences a man to death for blasphemy? No, we have not been watching the ‘Life of Brian’ recently and this is very real.

Saudi Arabia has rejected appeals by the lawyers of Saudi national, Ahmad Al Shamri, who was initially arrested on charges of atheism and blasphemy, before he was convicted by a local court and sentenced to death in Febraury 2015.

The defence of Mr Al Shamri relied on an insanity plea and they advocated that he was on drugs and alcohol at the time of the postings. Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia is on the verge of executing a man who abused religion and faith. His crime – blasphemy!

Saudi’s Make a Laughing Stock of Faith

This case again highlights how detached the State of Saudi Arabia has become from the rest of the world and from the fact that Islam has always talked about moderation, even with those who don’t believe. This means that life is sacrosanct in Islam and whether people question or leave Islam, their lives and the protection of their lives are still within the responsibility of the State and which Islam protects. The interpretation of Islam by the Wahabbi led Government is precisely the problem that has tainted Islam whose founding principles were based on co-existence and debate and negotiation and not on murdering people as the Saudi state now sees fit to undertake.

If Saudi murders this man, and that is what it will be, just remember this. Our country, the United Kingdom, will be round there touting for business – or – we can make clear that we don’t do business with murderers who are so scared of people challenging faith, that they need to murder them. We say, Islam is strong enough and with enough of a history of debate and dissent, meaning that those who leave and question it should be engaged with, rather than murdered. If we cannot value human life – every human life – than what is the point of faith?

Philippine security forces killed the leader of a militant group supporting Islamic State in a clash early on Thursday, the country’s police chief said, warning against possible retaliation.

President Rodrigo Duterte recently cautioned against Islamic State taking root in the southeast Asian country, saying it needed to avoid “contamination”.

“I strongly believe that we have effectively broken the backbone of the militant Ansar Al-Khilafah Philippines (AKP),” Ronald Dela Rosa told a news conference to announce the death of the group’s leader, Mohammad Jaafar Maguid.

Three AKP colleagues of Maguid were also arrested in a police operation shortly after midnight at a resort in the southern province of Sarangani, he added.

“He is the recognized ISIS leader in that area,” Dela Rosa said, adding that Maguid, who goes by the alias “Tokboy”, was the “most wanted person” in the country’s south, sought for his involvement in crimes ranging from arson and murder to bombings.

Police recovered two armalite rifles, a hand grenade, and M-16 magazines, from Maguid and the three men, identified as Matahata Dialawe Arboleda, Ismael Sahak, and Morhaban Veloso.

The AKP and the Maute militant group, which has also pledged allegiance to Islamic State, are among a handful of small groups authorities blame for years of unrest in the Philippine south.

The killing and the arrests would  “momentarily weaken” the group, Dela Rosa said, but a new leader could emerge eventually and launch fresh attacks.

“We expect some retaliation from the ISIS-inspired groups,” he added. “We should expect, and we should be very vigilant against, this possible retaliation.”

Philippine security forces are on full alert ahead of Monday’s feast of the Black Nazarene in the capital Manila. It  usually draws millions of devotees for a procession through the streets that runs for hours.