A Malaysian court charged 12 Muslims with criminal offenses yesterday for parading a severed cow head to protest the construction of a Hindu temple in a case that stoked religious tensions in this multiethnic country.
The 12 were among a large group of people who had marched from a mosque in Shah Alam, the capital of Selangor state, to the state chief minister’s office on Aug. 28 with the bloodied cow head. The cow is the most sacred animal in Hinduism.
They stopped at the gates of the office, where they stomped and spat on the head after listening to fiery speeches.
Their actions were recorded on video and the footage was uploaded onto the Internet.
Twelve of the protesters were charged with illegal assembly and six of them were also charged with sedition, which is punishable by up to three years in jail and a fine. Illegal assembly is punishable by one year in jail and a fine.
Sedition is defined as promoting ill will and hostility between different races.
The Shah Alam Sessions Court freed all 12 on bail. No date has been set for the trial, but the case will be heard again on Oct. 21.
The cow head protest deeply offended Hindus and stoked tensions among Malaysia’s main ethnic groups — the Malay Muslim majority and Chinese and Indian minorities. Indians are mostly Hindus.
Many of the protesters were residents of a largely Malay Muslim neighborhood in Shah Alam where the state government had planned to build the temple near a mosque.
The conflict highlighted frustrations among religious minorities about strict guidelines that restrict the number of non-Muslim places of worship, partly based on whether enough people of the non-Muslim faith live in the area where the church or temple is to be built.
Defense lawyer Salehuddin Saldin said his clients did not intend to offend Hindus and carried the cow head only as a symbol of the state government’s “stupidity.”
“It is not a serious offense. If you look at the Malay culture, the cow is synonymous to stupidity and not meant to insult other religions,” he said.
P. Uthayakumar, a prominent Hindu activist, dismissed the argument as laughable.
“It is a lame excuse,” said Uthayakumar, who noted that the Muslim protesters had also warned of bloodshed if the temple was built there.
State authorities in Selangor later said they found a new site in Shah Alam to build the temple, a few hundred meters from the original site.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home