But if a U.S. soldier simply touches a Koran it sets off days worth of bloody riots.

(AP) — Militants in Pakistan have found clever ways to hide homemade bombs. They’ve been strapped to children’s bicycles, hidden inside water jugs and even hung in tree branches. But the most shocking place that Brig. Basim Saeed has heard of such a device being planted was inside a hollowed-out book made to look like a Quran, Islam’s holy book.

A soldier who went to pick up the book from the floor was killed when it exploded.

“Normally if that book is lying somewhere on the floor, you tend to pick it up immediately just for respect,” said Saeed, the chief instructor at a school training Pakistani forces how to detect the so-called improvised explosive devices, which have become increasingly popular in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the insurgency in Pakistan’s northwest, near the Afghan border.

Saeed and other instructors at the military’s Counter IED, Explosives and Munitions School say it is important to constantly come up with new ways to prevent such homemade bombs because that’s exactly what the militants are doing.

“Terrorists are also very brainy,” Saeed said. “They are using different techniques to defeat our efforts also. So we need to be very proactive.”

The Pakistani military has sharply ramped up efforts to deal with such devices in recent years as they have emerged as the militants’ preferred weapon. So far, 4,042 soldiers from the army and Frontier Corps have been killed and more than 13,000 wounded in the war on militants in the country’s northwest since 2002, according to the Pakistani military. The homemade bombs account for most of the casualties.

HT: ROP