Oh simple trader, I hope thee rots in hell –

NEWARK, N.J. (Reuters) – A British man was found guilty of trying to provide material support to terrorists on Wednesday for selling a shoulder-launched missile to an undercover FBI informant posing as an Islamic militant seeking to attack the United States. Hemant Lakhani, 69, a British citizen born in India, was found guilty of five criminal charges by a U.S. District Court jury in Newark, New Jersey, that began deliberating on Tuesday.

His defense – racial profiling –

But while the prosecution depicted Lakhani as an enthusiastic broker eager to supply a terrorist group, the defense said he was a victim of overzealous law enforcement in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

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This almost feels like it should be a scene from Kung Fu Hustle except for

1) the unhappy ending and 2) it’s sadly all too true –

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – A Pakistani man accused of desecrating the Koran was shot dead Wednesday after being chased by an angry crowd. Ashiq Nabi, in his thirties, was accused of being disrespectful to Islam’s holy book and had been in hiding since Monday, a senior police official said. …Witnesses said the man was chased through fields and climbed a tree to get away from an angry crowd of up to 500 men. When he refused to come down, someone shot him dead, they said.

Although the article doesn’t really tell us how he desecrated the Koran, one of the mob’s motives here was apparently a type of vigilante justice. It appears that relative at least to this little slice of society, Pakistani courts almost come across as bastions of liberal due process. –

Blasphemy, including desecrating the Koran, is a capital offence in deeply Islamic Pakistan and carries the death sentence, but convictions have always been turned down by high courts because of a lack of evidence.

I guess in conjunction with the tragic death in India tab, we’ll start a count of the ones in Pakistan too. Continue reading →

For some reason, I end up covering the macabre “random death in India” beat for Sepia Mutiny. Here’s the latest one –

Up to 150 pilgrims drown in India Hundreds of wailing pilgrims have lined the banks of a holy river in central India and prayed for loved ones after more than 150 [previous pilgrims] either drowned or were missing when the gates of a nearby dam were opened. …The [first group of] pilgrims had gathered on the banks of Narmada a day ahead of the new moon, a period which is considered auspicious by Hindus as they feel bathing in the holy river at this time would wash away their sins. …officials at the Narmada Hydroelectric Development Corporation (NHDC), which operates the dam, said they were not aware of the Hindu fair downstream.

And wash away their sins it did.

For Ambaram Kakaria, it was too late. She sobbed as she performed the last rites over her 19-year-old nephew Babulal, who was due to be married soon. “I would have never allowed my nephew to come to this place had I known that I would be losing him forever,” she said. “I was planning to get him married in a couple of weeks.” …”We found the body of a woman with a one-year-old dead child in her arms,” police constable Ram Singh told Reuters.

Actually, I’m nowhere near as callous as this post makes me sound. It’s just a weird frustration where everytime I come across a headline like this, a little voice inside my head says “oh please, don’t say ‘in India’ ” and sure enough, it ends up being ‘in India.’

I suppose when you’ve got a billion people, an underdeveloped economy, a myth / superstition-fueled culture, and a (relatively) well-developed media, this sort of stuff percolates up moreso than, for ex., in China. But man, talk about wanting to bang your head into a wall. Continue reading →