“It was the spreading of those images by Moktadir and his friend Omar Faruk that apparently provoked Muslims to torch a dozen Buddhist temples and pagodas and damage six others in Ramu that night.” No one is responsible for those torchings except the torchers. There was nothing forcing them to react that way to these pictures. This is an elementary point, yet it is rapidly being lost in the West.
An update on this story. “Key ‘instigator’ detained,” by Julfikar Ali Manik for The Daily Star, October 11 (thanks to Heliogabalus):
Police on Tuesday night detained Abdul Moktadir, a key player in displaying and distributing among locals some Facebook images insulting the Quran on the evening of September 29 in Ramu.
It was the spreading of those images by Moktadir and his friend Omar Faruk that apparently provoked Muslims to torch a dozen Buddhist temples and pagodas and damage six others in Ramu that night.
The mayhem begun soon after the two showed those images, tagged in a Buddhist youth Uttam Kumar Barua’s Facebook account, to locals at Faruk’s mobile servicing shop at Fakirabazar in Ramu.
Eighteen-year-old Moktadir, also known as Alif, is a student of Shyamoli Ideal Polytechnic in Chittagong.
His friend Faruk, also 18, was detained on October 6, and is now being interrogated by law enforcers over the duo’s role in distributing the photos, police said.
Three days before his detention, Faruk described to this correspondent at the shop how he and Moktadir showed and distributed among people a number of images derogatory to Islam.
They also supplied soft copies of the picture to some local journalists, which soon got spread in and around Ramu within a few hours, Faruk had said.
This paper on October 4 published a report headlined “It all started form [sic] a tiny phone repair shop” based on Faruk’s account.
However, Moktadir’s mother Sajeda Begum Shimul said on Sunday that her son came across the photo when he went to the shop for having a mobile phone fixed.
This correspondent wanted from her Moktadir’s contact address and phone number, but she refused to give either. She also would not show any photo of her son, saying there was none….
Meanwhile, Nazibul Islam, the former officer-in-charge of Ramu Police Station, has already been closed to Chittagong Deputy Inspector General of Police’s office in Ramu after his withdrawal from Ramu over his mysterious inaction in containing the mayhem.