Punjab: Sacrilege attempt inside Golden Temple, accused beaten to death

The accused crossed the barrier inside the temple when Rahiras Sahib (evening prayers) was going on.

He tried to pick the historical sword, placed in front of the Guru Granth Sahib as a mark of respect, but was stopped by the alert sewadars of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Commitee (SGPC), the body which controls the management of the gurdwaras.

When he was being taken out of the holy shrine to the SGPC office complex, the angry mob beat him black and blue and he died on the spot.

Senior police officers reached the spot and started investigation.

The body was lying in the SGPC office complex in the Guru Ramdass Sarai area for a long time.

Parminder Singh Bhandal, the Deputy Commissioner of Police of Amritsar, said: "This evening during prayers, a man jumped the fence and entered the enclosed area. The congregation was offering prayers and bowing down."

"The man, about 20 to 25 years of age who had a yellow cloth tied on his head jumped the fence... the people inside held him and escorted him out to the corridor where there was a violent altercation and he died," he said.

"He was alone. All details will be revealed as there are a lot of CCTV cameras in the area and our teams are alert, sifting through footage. Postmortem will be done tomorrow. We will verify where he was from," Mr Bhandal added.

A sacrilege incident also took place last week in the Golden Temple, when a miscreant threw the 'Gutka Sahib' in the sarovar.

Meanwhile, many panthic outfits criticised the SGPC for not making proper security arrangements to control such type of incidents.

Sikh organisation 'Sar Lath Jatha' head Bhai Dilbagh Singh Sultanwind said that SGPC had failed to manage the proper administration as a result of which, 328 holy Sikh scriptures had been lost in the recent years and were still untraceable.

Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi, whose Congress party has been criticised that it has been lax about its handling of sacrilege cases, condemned the incident on Twitter.

Desecration of the Guru Granth Sahib and Sikh temples is a sentimental issue in Punjab and among Sikhs, who view the holy book as their 11th guru.

The sacrilege issue was one of the flash points in the feud between former Chief Minister Amarinder Singh and Punjab Congress chief Navjot Singh Sidhu which ultimately resulted in an acrimonious exit from of the former.

(With inputs from UNI)