Teenager shoots man accused of blasphemy in Pakistan police station Islamabad – A teenager walked into a Pakistani police station on Friday and shot dead a 65-year-old man from a minority sect accused of blasphemy. Reports say this is the second murder involving the country’s controversial blasphemy laws. Rights activists said the attack, a spike in the number of blasphemy cases, was evidence of rising intolerance in the mainly Sunni Muslim South Asian state of 180 million people. Victim Khalil Ahmad was a member of the minority Ahmadi community, a sect that said they are Muslims but whose religion is rejected by the Pakistani state. Ahmad and three other Ahmadis had asked a shopkeeper in their village in central Pakistan earlier this week to remove inflammatory stickers denouncing their community, said Saleem ud Din, a Spokesman for the Ahmadi community. In retaliation, the shopkeeper filed blasphemy charges against the four men on May 12. Ahmad, a father of four, was in police custody when the teenage boy walked in, asked to see him, and shot him dead, Din said. He said the police told him that the shooter, a high school student, had been arrested. Din said the lapse in security would have to be investigated. Critics say that Pakistani police are notoriously poorly trained, and security is often lax. “They told us the person who shot Khalil is just a boy,’’ Din told journalists. The hate campaign carried out against us by the mullahs is going on and on and on.’’ Khalil was killed in Sharaqpur police station, about 55 km (33 miles) northwest of the Punjab provincial capital of Lahore. Ahmadis have been arrested in Pakistan for reading the Koran, holding religious celebrations and having Koranic verses on rings or wedding cards. Some mullahs promise that killing Ahmadis earns one a place in heaven and give out leaflets listing their home addresses. Four years ago, 86 Ahmadis were killed in two simultaneous attacks on Friday prayers in Lahore. The Ahmadis consider themselves Muslims but believe in a prophet who came after Mohammed. A 1984 Pakistani law declared them non-Muslims, which makes them particularly vulnerable to the country’s blasphemy law
Posted on: Sat, 17 May 2014 11:25:19 +0000
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