Tag Archives: february 29

2016: Mumtaz Qadri, assassin of Salman Taseer

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On Leap Day in 2016, the bodyguard-turned-assassin of Punjab governor Salman Taseer was hanged for murder.

A longtime activist of the center-left Pakistan Peoples Party, Taseer was a prominent public figure for thirty-plus years and wrote a biography of hanged PPP Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1980.

A millionaire through financial services businesses and a minister in the federal government from 2007, Taseer became governor of the Punjab region in 2010. But as a secular- and liberal-minded elite, he was already becoming an artifact from a different Pakistan, and indeed his party was routed at the 2013 election.

The specific grievance nursed by our date’s principal Mumtaz Qadri, a former police commando recruited in 2010 to the personal security detail of the businessman/politician, was Taseer’s support for reversing the high-profile death sentence for blasphemy against a Pakistani Christian woman.* On January 4, 2011, Qadri opened up on his protective charge in an Islamabad marketplace, shooting him 28 times.

As a legal matter, this was all open and shut — but Qadri’s strike on behalf of Islamic militancy earned him wide admiration that reminded some observers of the Raj-era Punjabi assassin Ilm Deen. Hundreds of lawyers clamored to represent him pro bono while “cheering supporters clapped Qadri as he was bundled into court. ‘Death is acceptable for Muhammad’s slave,’ they chanted.” (Guardian)

Death is what he got, of course, although thousands subsequently marched in mourning and staged a parliament sit-in to demand sharia law. On the same day as that march, a suicide bomber attacked a Christian Easter gathering in a Lahore public park, killing 75 or more.

* After a yearslong legal odyssey, Asia Bibi’s conviction was vacated by the Pakistani Supreme Court only in 2018. She was allowed to emigrate to Canada in 2019. (Here’s a short interview with her Incidentally, a second politician, Federal Minister for Minorities Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti, was also assassinated in 2011 for advocating her position.

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1968: Two Jordanians, a sergeant and a civilian

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Soldier and Civilian Hanged By Jordan as Spies for Israel

AMMAN, Jordan, Feb. 29 — Two Jordanians, an army sergeant and a civilian, were publicly hanged at dawn today after having been convicted by a military tribunal on charges of spying for Israel.

The authorities said they had been caught in April, 1966, when the civilian, Mahmoud el-Haihi, 30 years old, was crossing into Jordan from Israel near his home in Tulkarm. He was said to have been carrying a message and money from Israeli military intelligence officer to Sgt. Fawzi Abdullah, 32, also from the Tulkarm area.

The death sentence was pronounced in January, 1967, and approved last month by King Hussein.

-New York Times, March 1, 1968

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1856: Auguste Chapdelaine, saintly casus belli

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On February 29, 1856, local Chinese officials in Guangxi beheaded French missionary priest Auguste Chapdelaine — and handed his countrymen a pretext for war.

Chapdelaine (English Wikipedia page | French) had gone illegally to the Chinese interior to proselytize Christianity.

The local mandarin Zhang Mingfeng was no doubt disposed to take such an harsh line against this provocation by virtue of the ongoing, Christian-inspired Taiping Rebellion, which had originated right there in Guangxi and was in the process of engulfing all of southern China in one of history’s bloodiest conflicts.

So Chapdelaine and his associates were snapped up, put to a few days’ dreadful torture, and on this date a Chinese convert and Chapdelaine were both summarily beheaded. (A female convert, Agnes Tsaou-Kong, expired under torture around the same time.)

Pietistic accounts of believers’ last extremes are here and here.


(Images from this French page.)

It took months for word of this martyrdom to reach French consular officials, and many months more for the gears of international diplomacy to turn — but when they did so, France pressed a demand for reparations.

Since pere Chapdelaine had been acting illegally in the first place, the Qing’s obdurate Viceroy Ye(h) adamantly refused to offer Paris satisfaction.

By 1858, this intransigence sufficed to license French entry (alongside Britain) into the Second Opium War, from which the Europeans won by force of arms a noxious treaty guaranteeing their right to push Christianity in China, extracting a couple million silver taels in damages, and (of course) assuring their right to traffic opium into China.

It would be rather ungenerous to hold all the ugly imperial consequences personally against our day’s martyr. August Chapdelaine was canonized by the Catholic Church in 2000 as one of 120 Martyrs of China.

China was not impressed by this celebration of a onetime colonial catspaw, and met the Vatican’s “anti-China” celestial promotion announcement with one of its own — charging that Chapdelaine “collaborated with corrupt local officials, raped women and was notorious in those areas [where he preached].”

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1528: Patrick Hamilton, Scotland’s first Protestant

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On this date in 1528, Lutheran Patrick Hamilton was condemned to death for heresy and immediately* burned at the stake outside St. Salvator’s Chapel in St. Andrews, Scotland.

The “first reformer” of Scotland — and practically the only one of note during the Reformation’s earliest phase — Hamilton sprang from noble stock and was studying in Paris just when Martin Luther’s doctrines roiled Europe’s ecclesiastical scene.

He traveled widely on the continent, visiting Luther himself along with a passel of the era’s humanists and reformers, returning to Scotland late in 1527 on what looks like the missionary equivalent of a suicide mission. Given a few weeks’ latitude to pontificate publicly, he had armed the guardians of the faith with more than enough evidence of his heterodoxy.

Hamilton was alive to the public relations potential of a gaudy public death for the faith. And he was right.

An opposing prelate would soon caution against making similar examples, noticing that “the reek of Maister Patrik Hammyltoun has infected as many as it blew upon.” In his ashes glowed the ember that would ignite the Scottish Reformation. The young** martyr bequeathed it his nation’s first Protestant text, Patrike’s Places

Nor is Hamilton’s legacy in St. Andrew’s strictly theological. The spot of his passion is marked with the initials “P.H.” on the street — a modest but powerful public testament to the courageous young man’s (ultimately fruitful) sacrifice.

* Though the sentence was put into effect immediately, a paucity of fuel made a weak fire, and Hamilton’s death consumed six agonizing hours on the spit.

** Only 23 or 24 at his death.

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