BAHAWALNAGAR, Pakistan — Threats of “blasphemy” charges in two provinces in Pakistan have sent a Christian cleaning worker and a young interfaith couple into hiding. In Chishtian, Bahawalnagar district in Punjab province, Muslim extremists accused cleaning worker Tanvir Masih of New Christian Colony with blasphemy after they found him using a broom whose handle was covered with a pharmaceutical firm’s advertisement cards bearing a verse from the Quran that read, “God is the best healer!”
Masih’s employer, a physician identified only as Dr. Arshad of the privately owned Bajwa Clinic, and the district health officer decided that Masih had committed no blasphemy against Muhammad, the Quran or Islam, and the extremists initially said they accepted their decision, a local pastor said. However, as Masih came out of the clinic he found irate Muslims had thronged the road, and he made a sprint for his life; since then no one has seen him or his family there.
In Karachi, Sindh province, the Muslim in-laws of a 33-year-old Christian man threatened to charge him with blasphemy — and kill his wife for suspected “apostasy,” or leaving Islam — after he refused to divorce her, the Christian man said. Shahbaz Javed said that since he secretly wed Mehwish Naz in a civil court in October 2008, his Muslim employer fired him from his factory job and his wife’s relatives found out where they lived and began to threaten them unless she divorced him.
“Her parents warned her again that if she did not give up all this, they would file a case of apostasy against her and implicate Shahbaz Javed in a blasphemy case or kill him,” said Pastor Khadim Bhutto, a Christian rights worker for Gawahi Mission Trust.
Share with others: