An eight-year-old boy accused of defiling a madrassa (a local religious school) is currently in pre-trial detention in eastern Pakistan.
According to reports from the British daily The Guardian, the child is accused of intentionally urinating on a carpet in the library of a Koranic school last month.
He is believed to be the youngest person charged with blasphemy in Pakistan.
If the charges are recognized, the child risks the death penalty.
A temple attacked
A subject that could not be more sensitive in Pakistani society, the affair did not take long to ignite public opinion.
Blasphemy accusations are usually politically instrumentalized by radical religious leaders.
Since 1986, and the introduction of the death penalty for this reason in the law, no execution has yet been pronounced.
But the accused often finds himself delivered to popular revenge and risks his life once deprived of judicial protection.
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The child's family fled the neighborhood where they lived after the attack on a Hindu temple last week, in retaliation for the "blasphemy".
In Bhong, a town in the eastern part of Punjab province, a group of Muslim fundamentalists damaged statues and set the main gate of the temple on fire.
Last Saturday, twenty people were arrested after this attack, according to Anglo-Saxon media.
A member of the child's family, who now has to live in hiding, told the Guardian: "
He [the boy] is not even aware of these blasphemy issues and he falsely gave himself up. to these questions.
He still does not understand what his crime was and why he was kept in jail for a week.
"
The person is also worried about the Hindu community as a whole, in an already tense context: “
We have left our shops and our work, the whole community is afraid and we fear negative reactions.
We don't want to come back to this region.
We do not see any concrete and significant action taken against the culprits or to protect the minorities who live here
”.
Government reaction
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan condemned the mob attack on Twitter and said he ordered the provincial police chief to take action against anyone involved, including negligent police officers.
He promised that the government would restore the temple.
In December last year, a large, violent mob of fundamentalist Muslims demolished a century-old Hindu temple in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Pakistan is the country that holds the record for mass violence in reaction to alleged blasphemous acts, according to a report by the US Commission on International Religious Freedoms released last year.