KHANEWAL, Pakistan — The head of a Muslim village ordered 250 Christian families to leave their homes in Khanewal district, Punjab province, area residents said.
Katcha Khoh village head Abdul Sattar Khan, along with other area Muslim residents, ordered the expulsions after Christian residents objected too strenuously to sexual assaults by Muslims on Christian girls and women, said Emmanuel Masih, a locally elected Christian official.
Most of the village’s Christian men work in the fields of Muslim land owners, while most of the Christian women and girls work as servants in the homes of Muslim families, said Rasheed Masih, another Christian man.
The Muslim employers have used their positions of power to routinely sexually assault the Christian women and girls, whose complaints grew so shrill that four Christian men — Emmanuel Masih, Rasheed Masih, his younger brother Shehzad Anjum and Yousaf Masih Khokhar — sternly confronted the Muslims, only to be told that all Christians were to leave the village at once.
Asked why they didn’t contact local Katcha Khoh police for help, Emmanuel Masih and Khokhar said filing a complaint against Muslim village head Khan and other Muslims would only result in police registering false charges against them under Pakistan’s notorious “blasphemy” statutes. (TAB)
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