More than 1,000 Islamic hardliners demonstrated against the Miss World beauty contest in host country Indonesia on Thursday, denouncing it as ‘smut and pornography’, as protests grow ahead of the show's weekend opening.
Opposition to the pageant in the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation has intensified in the past week, with demonstrators and some officials calling for the event to be scrapped. Organisers have already dropped the contest's famous bikini round but the move has failed to appease hardliners and protests have been growing, with today's the biggest yet.
Some 800 men and women from the Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia hardline group gathered in Jakarta outside the social welfare ministry, calling for the government's support to cancel the show.