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Hundreds of Facebook users welcomed the killing of liberal Pakistani politician Salman Taseer as a strike against reformers of the country's tight blasphemy laws.
The Punjab governor was shot on Tuesday by one of his guards, 26-year-old Mumtaz Qadri, who confessed to the murder because of Taseer's vocal opposition to the law that was recently used to sentence a Christian woman to death.
Analysts say the assassination underscores how deeply religious extremism has penetrated Pakistan's conservative society, with even the Internet-literate elite resorting to Facebook to rally support for the killer.
Nearly 2,000 Facebook users joined one group on the social networking site praising Qadri, and dozens of 'fans' joined other pages set up in Qadri's honour in the hours after the shooting.
All the pages had been removed by Wednesday. Facebook was not immediately reachable for comment.
But other private account holders used their Facebook status updates to make comments such as: 'We salute you Mumtaz Qadri,' "thank God he (Taseer) is not alive (any) more' and praise for the attacker as 'a soldier of Islam'.
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