[© Reuters/FAYAZ AZIZ People chant slogans in favour of a man who, according to the Pakistani police, is suspected of killing U.S. national Tahir Ahmed Naseem during a proceeding at a judicial complex, in a protest rally demanding his release, in Peshawar, Pakistan]
An item which reminds one that there are still plenty of gaps in the civilised world. On the face of it we have a US citizen shot down near a courtroom by a teenage vigilante. A vigilante who has been arrested, but who has become something of a national hero. So not good.
Reading on, I find that the US citizen, despite long years in the US, thought of himself as something of a prophet. Thoughts which had got him into trouble before he left his native Pakistan and which were clearly blasphemous according to the laws about same there. Religious laws of a severity which we have not known here in England since Tudor and Stuart times, when we executed heretics and witches. He was foolish enough to go back to Pakistan in 2018, where he was arrested and, seemingly, has been held in custody ever since. Until he got shot dead in the margins of a bail hearing.
An ugly business, not good at all, but also the case that the victim was foolish, not to say mentally disordered. Could his friends and family in the US not have stopped his going?
PS: by no means the first case of this kind.
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