A court in Pakistan has sentenced six people to death after convicting them for their roles in last year’s vigilante killing of a Sri Lankan factory manager accused by workers of committing blasphemy.
The six men sentenced to death were convicted of murder of Priyantha Kumara Diyawadana in a case that outraged many Pakistanis.
Priyantha Diyawadanage, 48, a factory manager in the city of Sialkot, was beaten to death and his body set alight last December.
Of 88 people convicted, nine were given life sentences and the others jail terms of two to five years.
The case shocked the country and was described as "a day of shame" by the then Prime Minister Imran Khan.
Videos of the lynching on social media showed scenes of the incensed crowd dragging Kumara from his workplace and beating him to death.
They then burnt his body, with several people seen in the crowd taking selfies with his corpse.
Kumara was working as a general manager in the Rajko industries (dealing in garments sportswear) in the Sialkot district for the last seven years or so.
Some factory employees had accused Kumara of tearing a poster of TLP inscribed with Islamic verses during his inspection of machines in the factory after which the mob dragged him out of the factory, brutally beat him and killed him before setting the body on fire.
After Kumara’s murder, some 200 suspects were taken into custody. However, over 100 of them were subsequently released after no evidence of their involvement in the incident was found.
The local business community had handed over a donation of USD 100,000 to Kumara’s wife and the factory owner had promised to give the victim’s salary of USD 1,650 to his family every month.
Kumara had gone to Pakistan in 2011 after he got a job as a mechanical engineer at an apparel factory in Faisalabad. After a year, he joined Sialkot’s Rajco Industries as its general manager and was the only Sri Lankan national working in the factory.
The Sri Lankan Parliament, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa had condemned the brutal killing and expressed hope that the Pakistan government would bring the guilty to justice.
The Pakistan Penal Code, the main criminal code of Pakistan, penalizes blasphemy against any recognized religion, providing penalties ranging from a fine to death.
According to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, around 80 people are known to be incarcerated in Pakistan on blasphemy charges — half of those face life in prison or the death penalty.
From 1967 to 2014, over 1,300 people were accused of blasphemy, with Muslims constituting most of those accused. According to human rights groups, blasphemy laws in Pakistan have been exploited not only for persecuting minorities but also for settling personal rivalries, often against other Muslims.
Though no judicial execution has been carried out under these laws, many of those accused, their lawyers and any persons speaking against blasphemy laws and proceedings have become victims of lynchings or street vigilantism in Pakistan. More than 75 people were murdered for blasphemy between 1987 and 2017.
