A shoe was hurled at Pakistan’s ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif by a religious extremist on Sunday during a function at an Islamic seminary in Lahore.
The incident took place a day after religious extremist blackened the face of Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khwaja Asif with ink when he was addressing his party’s workers’ convention in his hometown in Sialkot, some 100km from Lahore.
Sharif, who was the chief guest at Jamia Naemia seminary, Ghari Shahu Lahore, was heading towards the rostrum for a speech, when a student hurled a shoe at him that hit his shoulder and ear.
The student also managed to reach in front of Sharif and chant the “Labbaik Ya Rasoolullah” slogan. Security personnel caught the student and his accomplices, who chanted the same slogans, and gave them sound thrashing.
Handed over to police
Later, the two students were handed over to the police, who identified the shoe thrower as Abdul Ghafoor, a former student of the seminary, and his accomplice, Sajid. Sharif made a brief speech in which he did not mention the incident.
Religious parties, especially the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, had held Sharif and his party (PML-N) responsible for making an attempt to change a clause related to the finality of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) in the Constitution.
In Saturday’s incident, Faiz Rasool, who threw ink at the Foreign Minister, told the police that he vented out his anger because the PML-N had tried to change the finality of the Prophet in the Constitution. “This hurt the sentiments of millions of Pakistanis including myself,” he said.
Pakistan’s Law Minister Zahid Hamid had to resign last November when hundreds of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan supporters camped at Islamabad’s Faizabad traffic interchange forcing the PML-N government to take action against those in the federal cabinet responsible for attempting to change this clause from the Constitution.
The mainstream parties -- Pakistan People’s Party and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf -- condemned the incident.
PML-N leader and Railway Minister Khwaja Saad Rafique said that those afraid of the popularity of the PML-N are behind such incidents.
