By Wilson Chowdhry
Chairman of the British Pakistani Christian Organisation
A Christian beautician has been killed after she and two friends rebuked the advances of some young, allegedly drunk Muslim men from one of the elite areas of Lahore. The infuriated young men drove their car at the girls, injuring Shamroza, 18, and Sumble, 20, but killing Kiran Masih, 17, who was thrown from the car’s bonnet.
It is the latest in a particularly severe series of attacks on Pakistani Christians.
The capital’s development authority has officially called for Christians’ slums to be razed to the ground to protect the ‘beauty of Islam’. Christians live in poor areas because they cannot get well-paid jobs.
In Thailand, a young Christian mother, 30 year old Samina Faisal, died on Christmas Eve after being denied vital medical attention when detained by the immigration authorities, who did not tell her husband for a week.
This was closely followed by another similar death – 53 year old father of six Pervaiz Masih, who was detained in horrific conditions for four months, was denied treatment for a tumour and a heart condition.
Back in Pakistan, there have been attacks on churches, in one case with a Muslim man burning Bibles, and avoiding prosecution by faking mental illness.
Liaquat Masih, 47, a driver for a Muslim politician, was accused by his employer of stealing. The police tortured this father of three to death trying to get him to confess and then hid his body for 24 hours to conceal the evidence of their crime. When his family and other Christians protested the police brutally beat them, including women and his teenage son, whose legs were broken so he could not attend his father’s funeral.
A Christian cleaner and father of five was shot in the street by an unknown gunman, and his employer, the local council, refuses to support his now destitute family.
Also a 15 year old girl, Saima Masih, left church briefly to drink some water and was kidnapped to a town nearly 200km away and forced into marriage by a Muslim man.
Women have a low status in Pakistan, but none more so than Christian women. The Muslim NGO ‘Movement of Solidarity and Peace’, states that around 700 Christian women in Pakistan are abducted, raped and forced into Islamic marriage every year – that figure is almost two a day and the world does nothing. Evidence exists that some rogue imams declare that such acts of conversion through violence are rewarded in heaven.