YANGON – An armed Buddhist mob ransacked and burned down a mosque in northern Myanmar on Friday, the second attack on a mosque in just over a week as anti-Muslim sentiment swells in the Buddhist majority nation.
Villagers in Hpakant, a jade-mining town in the northern Kachin state, ransacked a mosque “wielding sticks, knives and other weapons” before burning it down, according to the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar.
It said the mosque’s leaders had failed to meet a June 30 deadline set by local authorities to tear down the structure.
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“The mob was unresponsive and entirely beyond control. The building was razed by the riotous crowd,” the paper reported, adding that the rampage was sparked by a dispute over the mosque’s construction.
On June 23, a mob demolished a mosque and a Muslim cemetery in a village in Bago Region, about 60 kilometers northeast of Yangon, reportedly as a consequence of a personal dispute.
