Fake Blasphemy, Fake 'Affair', Fake Theft

A Christian girl who worked as a maid for 8 years for a rich Muslim family in Lahore was released from the police cells after a Christian NGO intervened, after she was falsely accused of stealing $5500 dollars of jewelry from her employers house last month.  Arshad Bibi, aged 35 says that she did not do it, but was tortured into confessing by the police.  She is paid just $30 dollars a month for her work.  Typically the police had not investigated, but just took her mistresses word and sent her to prison.  The mistress instantly blamed the Christian when the jewelry was found to be missing.

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A story we missed from January involved a Christian boy of 19, Mard-e-Khuda, who was killed after being falsely accused of having an affair with a Muslim girl.  Three Muslim men in the town of Bahawalpur in South-west Punjab publicly boasted they were going to kill the Christian and threatened him.  At about 5:30 in the morning on the 9th of January they broke into his house, and one man held him by the feet, the other by the hands, and the third man struck him with an axe, and then the other two men stabbed him to death with daggers.  The attackers fled when the boys father woke up and shouted.  A case was registered against the three men, Muhammad Shafique, Illyas (aka Eidoo) and Sufiyan, but the police have done nothing, and a more senior officer stated that the Muslims rightly killed the Christians because she was having an affair with a Muslim girl.  Hindu men in Pakistan have similarly been killed for having any kind of relationship (romantic or not) with Muslim girls.

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Also in February, there was another attempt to falsely charge a Christian with blasphemy.  In Saddiqabad, in the very southwestern extremity of Punjab, a Muslim man called Sehar-ul-Zaman said that a cloth which the Christian, Jan Masih, used to spread on the floor and sit on, and sometimes sleep in, had 'the footprint of Mohammed' on it, and therefore this was blasphemy.  The same Muslim had accused a Christian boy of blasphemy by burning pages of the Quran last year, resulting in thousands of Muslims surrounding the police station and demanding he be handed over to be killed.  This time Sehar-ul-Zaman contacted the leaders of extremist groups with his accusations.  The man has been continually harrassing and blackmailing the Christian community and a Christian NGO contacted local Muslim leaders who investigated and completely exonerated Jan Masih, so thankfully the incident was contained, although his life is still in danger from extremists.  However, it took 2 days of negotiation to free the accused.

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