Pakistani police arrest 4 men who destroyed statue of Buddha
Associated Press | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 6 years, 3 months AGO
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — Police arrested four men Saturday for allegedly destroying an ancient statue of Buddha they found while doing construction work near an historic Buddhist site in northwest Pakistan, officials said.
The arrests in the district of Mardan were made hours after a video went viral on social media showing a man breaking the statue with a hammer when it was still partially embedded in the ground.
Local archaeologists later determined the Buddha statue was of historic value.
The men, charged under the country's antiquities laws, face up to five years in jail if convicted. The laws prohibit the destruction of damage to any antiquities, police said.
“We have taken the pieces of the destroyed Buddha into our custody to assess its archaeological value but apparently it was an ancient one. We lost it unfortunately," said Abdul Samad Khan, who heads the province's archaeology department.
Police said they are questioning the men, who are local residents, to determine exactly why they destroyed the Buddha, instead of alerting authorities.
The incident took place not far from Takhat Bhai, a mountainous area that was once part of Gandhara, an important Buddhist kingdom that stretched across modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan more than 1,000 years ago.
Pakistan possesses a rich cultural heritage but doesn't have the resources to adequately protect it.
ARTICLES BY ASSOCIATED PRESS
Hong Kong police arrest 4 from university student union
HONG KONG (AP) — Four members of a Hong Kong university student union were arrested Wednesday for allegedly advocating terrorism by paying tribute to a person who stabbed a police officer and then killed himself, police said.
For South Sudan mothers, COVID-19 shook a fragile foundation
JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — Paska Itwari Beda knows hunger all too well. The young mother of five children — all of them under age 10 — sometimes survives on one bowl of porridge a day, and her entire family is lucky to scrape together a single daily meal, even with much of the money Beda makes cleaning offices going toward food. She goes to bed hungry in hopes her children won’t have to work or beg like many others in South Sudan, a country only a decade old and already ripped apart by civil war.
For South Sudan mothers, COVID-19 shook a fragile foundation
JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — Paska Itwari Beda knows hunger all too well. The young mother of five children — all of them under age 10 — sometimes survives on one bowl of porridge a day, and her entire family is lucky to scrape together a single daily meal, even with much of the money Beda makes cleaning offices going toward food. She goes to bed hungry in hopes her children won’t have to work or beg like many others in South Sudan, a country only a decade old and already ripped apart by civil war.