Pakistani traders on Thursday announced a reward of 10-million rupees (%165 000) for anyone who beheads Salman Rushdie following Britain’s decision to award the novelist a knighthood.
The announcement came during a protest by 200 traders at Aabpara market, one of the main bazaars in the capital, Islamabad, an Agence France-Presse photographer said.
”We will give 10-million rupees to anyone who beheads Rushdie,” the secretary general of the Islamabad Traders’ Association, Ajmal Baluch, told the cheering crowd.
He also called on Islamic countries to boycott British products in protest at the honour to Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
Participants chanted ”Cut off the head of Salman Rushdie!” and carried placards calling for Rushdie to be killed.
Other placards demanded that the Pakistani government give the country’s highest award to fugitive Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar and al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in response to the British move, witnesses said.
Rushdie was issued with a death sentence by Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 in a fatwa that has never been revoked.
Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in January 2005 he still believed the British novelist’s killing would be authorised by Islam. — AFP
