Protesters Burn Mosque

Sept. 1, 2004

About 4000 people set Kathmandu's biggest mosque ablaze and smashed up private job recruitment agencies yesterday in response to the killing of 12 Nepalese jobseekers in Iraq.
Protesters also pulled furniture and electrical equipment out of the Jama Masjid mosque and torched them on the footpath, they said.

Riot police used batons to push the angry protesters back from the mosque, eventually sealing off the area.

Earlier, hundreds of youths rampaged through the streets of the capital, smashing up more than a dozen private employment agencies that they blamed for sending the 12 Nepalese jobseekers to Iraq. The mob shattered windows and set fire to vehicles, furniture, motorcycles and electrical equipment belonging to the agencies, police said.

"There are some people who turned violent and started attacking employment offices in Kathmandu," Home Minister Purna Bahadur Khadka said.

A militant Iraqi group said it had killed 12 Nepali hostages and showed pictures of one being beheaded and others being shot dead, the worst mass killing of captives since a wave of kidnappings erupted in April.

In a small Nepali village near terraced paddy fields about 25km from Kathmandu, the father of one of the hostages wept inconsolably.

"Oh Lord, why have you kept me alive," said Jit Bahadur, father of hostage Ramesh Kadhka who was lured to Iraq by the hope of earning $795 a month -- six times what he would have made from his old job in a restaurant.

Fears mounted overnight for two French journalists also held hostage.

A second deadline set by their kidnappers expired with no word on their fate after a day of frantic efforts by France to drum up Arab support to free them.

The kidnappers holding reporters Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot have demanded France scraps a ban on Muslim headscarves in schools.

French President Jacques Chirac, refusing to back down over the headscarf ban, led a broad diplomatic push to appeal to the militants holding Malbrunot and Chesnot.

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,10639912%255E663,00.html