ISLAMABAD: Police in the Pakistani province of Punjab have said they had arrested at least a hundred suspects, including the “main accused” in the lynching of a Sri Lankan manager on Friday over apparent blasphemy.

Priyantha Kumara was beaten to death and set ablaze by a mob, police confirmed, in an incident that Prime Minister Imran Khan has described as a “day of shame” for Pakistan. Armagan Gondal, a police chief in the district where the killing occurred in Pakistan’s Punjab province, told media factory workers had accused the victim of desecrating posters bearing the name of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

“In Sialkot incident, police have arrested Farhan Idrees, one of the main accused involved in torture and incitement,” Punjab police said on Twitter. “More than 100 people have been arrested,” police added, saying the inspector general of Punjab police was supervising the case.

Few issues are as galvanising in Pakistan as blasphemy, and even the slightest suggestion of an insult to Islam can supercharge protests and incite lynchings.

PM Khan said he would personally oversee an investigation into "the horrific vigilante attack": "Let there be no mistake all those responsible will be punished with full severity of the law," he tweeted.

The army chief offered the military’s full support to the civil administration to ensure the perpetrators were arrested and brought to justice.

Human rights minister Shireen Mazari called the incident “horrific and condemnable”: “Mob violence cannot be acceptable under any circumstance as the state has laws to deal with all offences. Punjab govt's action must & will be firm and unambiguous.”

Video footage of the incident shared on electronic and social media showed hundreds of people gathered outside the factory, amid plumes of smoke rising from a spot in the center of the crowd where the perpetrators had reportedly burnt the body of the victim after beating him to death. Other videos showed a mob dragging a man’s heavily bruised body out to the street, where they burned it in the presence of hundreds of demonstrators who cheered on the killers.

Many in the mob made no attempt to hide their identity and some took selfies in front of the burning corpse.

The slogans chanted in the social media videos were the same used by supporters of the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a religious political party that has railed against blasphemy on its rise to prominence.

The TLP has in the past paralysed the country with protests, including an anti-France campaign after Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last year republished cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh). The group was only unbanned last month and its leader freed from detention after another period of civil unrest in which seven police officers were killed.

In just five years the party has seen its reach explode in Pakistan, opening a new chapter in the country's deadly confrontation with the extreme right.

Friday’s latest attack also comes less than a week after a Muslim mob burned a police station and four police posts in northwest Pakistan after officers refused to hand over a man accused of desecrating Islam’s holy book, the Quran. No officers were hurt in the attacks in Charsadda, a district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Pakistan’s government has been under pressure for the past several decades to change the country’s blasphemy laws. However, the religious right in the country has strongly resisted such demands.

A Punjab governor in Islamabad was shot and killed by his own guard in 2011, after he defended a Christian woman, Aasia Bibi, who was accused of blasphemy. She was acquitted after spending eight years on death row and, receiving threats, left Pakistan for Canada where she lives in exile with her family.