ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan government distanced itself yesterday from a $100,000 bounty offered by a Cabinet minister for the death of the maker of an anti-Islam film that has sparked protests across the Muslim world.
Railways Minister Ghulam Ahmed Bilour invited members of the Taleban and Al-Qaeda to take part in the “noble deed,” and said given the chance he would kill the filmmaker with his own hands.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf rejected Bilour’s comments, made on Saturday, a day after angry protests across Pakistan against the “Innocence of Muslims” left 21 people dead and more than 200 injured. “This is not government policy. We completely dissociate (ourselves) from this,” the spokesman told AFP.
More than 50 people have died in protests and attacks around the world linked to the low-budget film which mocks Islam, since the first demonstrations on Sept. 11.
Nationwide rallies against the movie mobilized more than 45,000 people on Friday, which the government had made a public holiday to allow people to protest, though numbers were comparatively low in a country of 180 million people. Police used tear gas and live rounds to fight back protesters, many of them members of right-wing religious parties and supporters of banned terror groups, as they attacked shops and cinemas in Karachi and Peshawar and tried to reach Western embassies in the capital.
Bilour, a member of the Awami National Party (ANP), a key partner in the fragile coalition government led by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) announced the bounty on Saturday.
“I announce today that this blasphemer who has abused the holy prophet, if somebody will kill him, I will give that person a prize of $100,000,” he told reporters in Peshawar.
“I also announce that if the government hands this person over to me, my heart says I will finish him with my own hands and then they can hang me.”
The producer of the film, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, is reported to be a 55-year-old Egyptian Copt and convicted fraudster, based in Los Angeles and currently out on parole.
In Bangladesh, most schools, shops and offices were closed yesterday as opposition parties enforced a nationwide strike to protest against the film.
Thousands of police patrolled the capital Dhaka and roads were quiet across the country on what is normally a business day in the Muslim-majority country of 153 million people.
About 40 activists were briefly detained after they tried to barricade a main road and threw bricks at police, local Dhaka police chief Abul Kashem told AFP.
In Chittagong, Bangladesh’s second largest city and only port, protesters torched a bus and damaged a police van, police said, adding that three students had been arrested.
In Hong Kong, thousands of Muslims staged protests against the anti-Islam film and French cartoons yesterday, briefly scuffling with police as they tried to deliver a letter to the US consulate.
The protesters, who numbered more than 3,000 according to police and organizers, held up banners to denounce the film and cartoons as they marched through the city chanting “Allahu akbar” or “God is greater”.
The group, including women in headscarf and children, briefly clashed with police as they tried to break through a cordon outside the US consulate to deliver a petition letter, according to an AFP reporter at the scene.
“Freedom of speech should not be used against any religion,” Saeed Uddin of the Incorporated Trustees of the Islamic Community Fund of Hong Kong, a group that claims it represents some 300,000 Muslims in the city, said before the march.
“This is not the first time that our Holy Prophet has been insulted and attacked,” he said, branding the cartoons and the film as “malicious, disrespectful and derogatory”.
Uddin, a Pakistani who has lived in the southern Chinese city for 35 years, urged the American and French governments to take action against the filmmaker and cartoonist who are behind the controversial works.