“Are these the people with bullets who took my papa away?” two-year-old Sabiha Ahmad asked her mother anxiously when AFP visited her family, members of Pakistan’s persecuted Ahmadi minority, who are currently living in hiding. The toddler’s family have had little contact with anyone since they were forced to flee for their lives on November 20 when hundreds of people torched a factory in the eastern city of Jhelum after rumours spread workers were burning copies of the Koran. Sabiha’s …
A two-member Supreme Court bench refused to grant bail on Wednesday to four men accused of attacking Ahmadi community homes in Gujranwala. In July, 2014, a mob had set fire to five houses of Ahmadis in People’s Colony after rumours of an alleged blasphemy incident. A woman and two girls were burned to death and eight others were seriously injured. On Wednesday, the Lahore Supreme Court bench, headed by Justice Ijaz Ahmed Chaudhry, dismissed the post arrest bail applications of four …
Gunmen in a Punjab village shot dead a member of the Ahmadi religious minority on Saturday, five days after a Muslim leader denounced Ahmadis on a popular television show. “Lucman Ahmad- who was in his 20s- left his house for his agriculture farm on Gujranwala-Hafizabad road yesterday morning, when two unidentified motorcyclists intercepted him and opened fire at him, killing him on the spot,” Saleemuddin, spokesperson for Jamaat Ahmadiyya Pakistan, said on Sunday. Kot Ladha SHO Malik Fayyaz Ahmed said …
A man was forced to abandon his woodworking business and flee Gujranwala with his family after his erstwhile friends and neighbours discovered that he was an Ahmadi. Imran Ahmed, 35, started out as a daily wager at a woodwork shop in Gujranwala. He saved up money for three years, then invested Rs100,000 in machinery and setting up his own workshop. As his business grew, he hired two carpenters to work for him. “Things were going really well, but nobody knew …