Pakistan’s Campus Lynching

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What drives a mob to climb several flights of stairs, break down a dormitory door and kill the young man inside? Secunder Kermani pieces together the last hours of Mashal Khan, the undergraduate beaten to death by vigilantes in April, 2017. It happened in the small city of Mardan, set on a fertile plain below mountains that form part of the border with Afghanistan. Until recently, this part of Pakistan was officially known as a “frontier”. Here, as in the rest of this huge Muslim country, blasphemy is a crime. The reported confessions of those arrested for the murder cite the victim’s “un-Islamic views”. In the weeks following the attack, religious conservatives rallied in support of the accused killers. But the murder has also shocked people. While lynching is not unheard of in Pakistan, the fact that this one happened on a university campus and that gruesome footage of it was widely shared online has reignited the controversy over Pakistan’s strict blasphemy laws. The BBC’s Secunder Kermani is based in Pakistan and has gone to meet the families and friends on both sides of this story and asks, Who was Mashal Khan? And why did he die? (Photo: Pakistani civil society members and university students shout slogans and wave placards as they protest against the killing of Mashal Khan a journalism student, in Islamabad. Credit: Getty Images)