A year later, Afghans reflect on a mob lynching of a woman falsely accused of burning Koran
A year later, Afghans reflect on a mob lynching of a woman falsely accused of burning Koran Last year, on the eve of the Persian New Year, amateur cellphone video captured by hundreds of mostly young men showed a crowd beating a young woman, her face covered in blood. She pleaded for her life and denied their accusation — that she had burned pages from the Koran. After she was dead, they dragged her body from the back of a Toyota hatchback, dumped the corpse in a dry patch of the Kabul River and set it afire. The gruesome video circulated online and soon was everywhere. The desperate cries of Farkhunda Malikzada, a 27-year-old student of Islamic studies, echoed in news broadcasts as Afghan commentators and politicians debated how such an act could have taken place in one of the Afghan capital’s most trafficked areas. Within 24 hours after the killing on March 19, 2015, security officials and the Afghan religious affairs ministry declared there was no evidence proving...