Florida pastor supervises Quran burning

Jones said that "trial" of the holy Quran was held on Sunday by a jury of 12 church members and volunteers, with a Dallas Imam as a defence lawyer.

"We had a court process. We tried to set it up as fair as possible, which you can imagine, of course, is very difficult," Jones told The USA Today.

The punishment — burning the book after it had been soaked in kerosene for an hour — was determined from four choices on his organisation's Facebook page.

The Muslim community in the United States has declined to respond to such an act by Jones and his small group of followers.

"Terry Jones had his 15 minutes of fame and we're not going to help him get another few minutes," said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Jones, however, considered the burning of Quran as a one-time event and said that he had no plans to do it on a mass scale.