Holy Quran | Pakistan

A person stole a Holy Quran from a mosque near the French city of Lyon and set it on fire at the weekend, religious leaders and a police source said Tuesday. On the night of Sunday to Monday, “an individual with an uncovered face entered the prayer room, grabbed a copy of the Holy Quran, set it on fire then dropped it outside the building before fleeing,” the council of mosques in the Rhone region said. The police source said an investigation had begun into the incident. The attack comes after a man who had posted racist videos shot dead his Tunisian neighbour and badly wounded a Turkish man in the southern town of Puget-sur-Argens on Saturday. The suspected killer, a Frenchman born in 1971, fled the scene in a car but was arrested not far away after his partner alerted police. According to Le Parisien newspaper, the suspect said he “swore allegiance to the French flag” and called on the French to “shoot” people of foreign origin in one of his videos posted on social media. Anti-terrorism prosecutors have tak...

A man who desecrated a copy of the Holy Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London was found guilty on Monday of committing a religiously aggravated public order offence, in a verdict critics said effectively reinstated an abolished blasphemy law. Hamit Coskun, 50, was fined 240 pounds ($325) at London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court after being convicted of being disorderly by shouting “F*** Islam” as he held aloft the burning book near the consulate in central London in February. The lawyer for Coskun, whose father was Kurdish and his mother Armenian and who lived in central England, had argued that the prosecution amounted to an attempt to bring back a blasphemy law that was abolished in England in 2008. Coskun had denied the charge and said on social media he was carrying out a protest against the Turkish government. While he was holding the book aloft, he was attacked by a man with a knife who kicked and spat at him. “Burning a religious book, although offensive, to some is not necessarily disorderly...