HAJIPUR, Pakistan — Forced conversions and abduction of Christian girls in Pakistan has risen at an alarming rate, said Nasir Saeed, director of the Centre for Legal Aid, Assistance & Settlement–U.K.
“Since the government has failed to investigate Muslim clerics who are suspected of being involved in forced conversions and issuing of false certificates of conversion and marriages, such crimes will continue happening, and I see no end to the miseries of girls belonging to the Christian and other minority faiths,” he said. “Instead, I fear that it will worsen.”
A recent incident left a 27-year-old Christian woman raped and her father shot.
Ghulam Hussain and three other Muslims kidnapped Asma Gulzar at gunpoint in May and repeatedly raped and tortured her, the woman informed her family after fleeing her captors in August when they forgot to lock the door of their hideout, the family attorney said. She had gone missing from her aunt’s home in Sialkot’s Hajipur area in Punjab Province.
Her father, Gulzar Masih, took the assailants to court over their claim that Asma Gulzar had voluntarily converted from Catholicism to Islam and married Hussain. After hearing the woman’s testimony of abduction and rape, a judge ordered police Aug. 24 to immediately arrest the accused, an attorney said.
The police refused to comply with the court order and three days later Hussain and one of his accomplices attacked Masih, shooting him several times, but he survived. (MS)
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