ISLAMABAD: As many as 12 policemen have been fired and 33 suspended from service for a year after an inquiry into a December attack on a Hindu temple found that officials had been ‘negligent,’ Pakistani media reported on Thursday.

The temple’s destruction by a mob in Karak, a town in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, drew condemnation from human rights activists and leaders of Pakistan’s minority Hindu community.

Local clerics had organized what they told police would be a peaceful protest against the alleged expansion of the temple, but some clerics leading the protest started “provocative speeches”, following which the crowd attacked the temple.

“They showed cowardice, negligence, and irresponsibility in the discharge of their official obligations,” Pakistan’s Express Tribune newspaper reported, quoting an inquiry report which said officers had failed to protect the temple.

Referring to the report, KP Inspector General Dr. Sanaullah Abbasi said there was no room for negligent officers in the police department.

“We had said that if the police were found to be negligent, they would go home,” he told media. “The first priority of the police is the protection of life and property of the people in which negligence will not be tolerated.”

On January 5, the Supreme Court directed the chairman of the Evacuee Trust Property Board (ETPB), which handles minorities’ properties, to immediately visit the site of the destroyed temple and begin its reconstruction. The government has since announced that the temple would be rebuilt.

The temple was first built in the early 1900s as a shrine, but the local Hindu community left in 1947 and by 1997 the site had been taken over by local Muslims.

In 2015, the Supreme Court ordered it be handed back to the Hindu community and the shrine rebuilt, on condition that it would not be expanded in the future.