“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 …
November, 27, 2015 — It was pitch dark at 2:30am in the morning. The only sounds that Imran* could hear were coming from the factory that was set ablaze a kilometer away, and the slogans against Imran and the rest of the Ahmadi community in Jehlum. I was almost whispering, convincing my fellow Ahmadis to come out of hiding and show themselves to me, so that I could take them to a safe distance but there was no response, Imran …
A mob torched the homes of several Ahmadiyya families and an Ahmadiyya Mosque in Pakistan’s Jhelum district on Saturday. The incident came just a day after a mob burnt down a factory owned by Ahmadiyya Muslims in the same area. The Mosque which is located in Kala Gujran area of Jhelum was being guarded by local police when the mob broke through the security cordon, which was established to safeguard the Mosque, following Friday night’s unrest.