Pakistan opens up Facebook; Bangladesh blocks it
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Pakistan has re-opened access to Facebook, but only after Facebook assured the Pakistani government that the offending material has been removed.
“In response to our protest, Facebook has tendered their apology and informed us that all the sacrilegious material has been removed from the URL,” said Najibullah Malik, secretary of Pakistan’s information technology ministry, referring to the technical term for a Web page.
Facebook assured the Pakistani government that “nothing of this sort will happen in the future,” Malik said.
But apparently in the area of Islam and cartooning, where one door opens, another one closes.
A spokesman for the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) told AFP Facebook had “hurt the religious sentiments of the country’s majority Muslim population” by carrying “offensive images” of Mohammed.
“Some links in the site also contained obnoxious images of our leaders including the father of the nation Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the leader of the opposition,” said the commission’s acting chair, Hasan Mahmud Delwar.
On Saturday, one man was arrested by the elite Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) in Dhaka and charged with uploading the images.
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