LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) – Different Pakistani political and religious groups protested for a fourth day Sunday against what they call blasphemous caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Protesters in multiple cities burned the French flag and an effigy of the French president, calling for the banning of the weekly satirical magazine. One protest paid tribute to the brothers who attacked the magazine’s offices.
The biggest protest took place in the eastern city of Lahore, where over 10,000 supporters of the hard-line Jamaat-ud-Dawa organization chanted “Down with Charlie Hebdo” and “Death to blasphemers.”
Jamaat-ud-Dawa leader Hafiz Mohammad Saeed urged Muslim leaders to convince the United Nations to declare any form of blasphemy an international crime.
“If the United Nations doesn’t pay any heed to it, then Muslim states should form a United Nations of their own,” Saeed said.