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.

Punjab’s new information minister, Islamist politician Fayaz-ul-Hasan Chohan, has announced a ban on “vulgar” movie billboards in the Pakistani province, angering those who fear the growing influence of hardliners under new Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Since Khan’s party appointed him last week, Chohan has caused a number of rows, including with his visit to the grave of a man sentenced to death for killing the governor of Punjab in 2011, and with critical remarks about Nargis, a popular Pakistani singer and actress.

“If any vulgar billboard is found at any cinema in Punjab after three days, there will be a fine in first place, and if any one didn’t comply, that cinema will be shut down,” Chohan told a public meeting in the eastern city of Lahore.

“Is there any humanity that you print half-naked women and put them on big billboards?” he said.

Khan’s election victory in July was helped by strong support from Islamist parties. Chohan joined Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Justice Movement from the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan.

“It’s pure moral policing,” the left-leaning politician and rights activist Ammar Rashid said on Twitter.

An Islamist party in Pakistan called for the expulsion of the Dutch ambassador on Wednesday as it launched a protest against a far-right Dutch politician’s plan for a cartoon competition featuring caricatures of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed.

Several thousand activists gathered in the eastern city of Lahore for the demonstration organised by Tehreek-e-Labbaik, a party that amassed the fifth largest number of votes in a general election last month having campaigned as a defender of the laws and punishments for crimes of blasphemy.

Party leader Khadim Hussain Rizvi set out from Lahore’s historic centre at the head of a protest he aims to take through the towns of Punjab province to the capital Islamabad, where protesters will stage a sit-in to pressure Pakistan’s new Prime Minister Imran Khan to cut diplomatic ties with the Netherlands.

“The Dutch ambassador should be immediately deported,” Labbaik spokesman Ejaz Ashrafi told Reuters. “We will only stop when the government meets this demand.”

Pakistan has already complained to the Dutch government about far-right parliamentarian Geert Wilders’ plans for a cartoon contest that will upset and provoke Muslims.

Wilders intends to display the cartoons on the walls of his political party’s room in parliament. He says he’s had “hundreds” of entries.

“The Foreign Office called the chargé d’affaires of the Netherlands and issued him a Demarche’ to record a protest,” the Pakistani prime minister’s office said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte said last week that the cartoon competition “was not something I would do” and his government was not associated with it.

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said he planned to take up the issue with the United Nations and several world leaders.

“They don’t understand how much they hurt us when they do such acts,” Khan, a cricketer-turned-politician, said on Tuesday, a day after the upper house of parliament condemned the proposed cartoon competition.

Officials from the Punjab provincial government met with Labbaik leaders in Lahore in a vain attempt to persuade them to call off their protest.

“We told them to stop the protests because the Pakistan government is taking up the issue effectively,” an official involved on the talks told Reuters, adding that Labbaik representatives insisted the protest would only end once the Dutch envoy was expelled.

Last year, in a stand-off with the previous government, Labbaik shut down a main highway leading into Islamabad for nearly three weeks over a small change in wording to an electoral law changing a religious oath to a simple declaration. Labbaik said the change amounted to blasphemy.

The ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz was forced to accept the resignation of law minister Zahid Hamid, who Labbaik held responsible for the change, after seven people were killed and nearly 200 wounded in a failed attempt by police to disperse protesters.