ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Infuriated by an alleged anti-Islamic comment by a mentally ill man, more than a dozen Muslims attacked his Christian family in Islamabad, beating his 20-year-old sister unconscious and breaking her leg.
The woman’s father, Aleem Mansoor, said his daughter Elishba Aleem was unconscious after being struck in the head with an iron rod in the Dec. 28 attack.
Mansoor said Muslims beat him, his daughter and other family members with rods and cricket bats on the street in front of their apartment home after falsely accusing his 32-year-old son, Shumail Aleem, of blasphemy.
Aleem, who suffers from schizophrenia, had remarked to a Christian that a shopkeeper was right as a Muslim not to show movies in his general store during a Muslim holy day — to which shopkeeper Muhammad Naveed responded by beating Aleem for profaning Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad.
Mansoor’s daughter received treatment at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (IMS) and eventually regained consciousness, though she remains in intense pain.
When Mansoor told Naveed and others that he would take them to court over the attack, his Muslim adversaries said he would fail because they had paid IMS officials $600 to withhold the medical report on his daughter’s injuries.
He said they also told him that they had paid off officers at the Shehzad Town Police Station to pressure the family to drop the case with an out-of-court settlement.
“The assistant subinspector, Ghulam Gilani, of Shehzad Town Police Station, called my wife and told her that if the family pursued the case of assault on us, then we would be implicated in the blasphemy case, which would have serious consequences for us,” Mansoor said.
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