Another gang rape in Punjab

A Khanewal Hospital

BPCA have just received news that there has been yet another gang rape of a Christian girl, this time in Khanewal in the Punjab province, about 200 km west -southwest of Lahore.

The 13 year old girl whose name is reported as Farah Danial, was raped by four attackers (described as 'young boys') has been admitted to Khanewal hospital for treatment, and is greatly distressed.

Please pray with her for justice and for healing.

Source : Facebook contact

Christian nurse kidnapped by colleague and his friend who used rape video to blackmail and attempt forcible conversion to Islam

Crime Scene - Lahore hospital

Two months ago, a supposed colleague and 'friend' raped a Christian nurse. Shiasta Samuel, a 27 year old nurse in the SIMS hospital in Lahore, thought she was friends with the chief perpetrator, Ali Adnan, who had an admin role at the hospital. He quite often visited her family. But then he started acting differently, criticising Christian women for not following Muslim dress codes and 'following their own religion'. He then told Miss Samuel that he liked her and she should convert to Islam and marry him, but she refused, citing the fact that she was married and they were of different faiths. Adnan then started harrassing her at home and work, including blocking her way at work, threatening her family if she did not marry him and then setting their house on fire.

Then on 21st of August 2011 he came up behind her and forced her into a car in the car park, saying not to make a fuss as it would be embarrassing for her and that he wanted to 'just clear up some misunderstanding'. As they came to the carpark an accomplice came and put a gun to her head. They raped her and videoed the assualt, and then brought her back, telling her that if she told anyone about the rape, they would send the film to her family and upload it on social networking sites. For a while she complied, to spare her family shame, but Adnan started ringing up to blackmail her. He said she had to convert to Islam, and only then would he 'forgive' her for refusing his proposal. When she refused, he started demanding sexual favours and again threatened to come and show the film to her family, which he then did when she refused.

He told her family that they had no other option but to 'hand her over' to him because he 'owned' her now. This presented the family a terrible dilemma and illustrates the situation faced by Christian women in perverse Pakistani society - in that it is victims of rape who are shamed and publicly pilloried in Pakistan, not the perpetrators. They bravely and commendably decided to report the incident to the police. Those of you who have read this blog for some time will not be surprised at what happened next. The police deliberately gave the perpetrators time to get 'pre-arrest bail' and they fled their homes, even though the victims family went to the police every day to press them to take the statements of the accused. They used delaying tactics and started asking the victim ridiculous questions, thus continuing the trauma she had endured. At work there were constant accusing stares, and eventually she took leave. The administration has set up a committee to probe the affair, but no-one from her work has contacted her.

First of all we would like to applaud the family for seeking justice and not remaining silent, a brave decision, especially since they had to know the police were likely to be difficult. This story amply demonstrates the depraved nature of much of Pakistani society, where Christians feel they have no choice but to put up with the kind of behaviour the rapist (so-called 'friend') displayed against them in their own homes even before the crime, and where the victims of sexual violence are treated as criminals and social pariah's and the perpetrators go free. We can also see how the massive power imbalance is used to try and use rape and shame and blackmail to coerce Christian women to convert. The fact that police so often mirror society's oppression of Christians means criminals feel they can attack Christians with impunity.

Source : http://www.compassdirect.org/english/country/pakistan/article_120106.html

Edit - apologies, wrong link used, now updated 19:00 on 14-10-11. Story for other link to follow.

Interview with CLAAS

The CLAAS staff interviewed for video

Recently Barnabas Fund released clips from a brief interview with CLAAS staff members about the situation in Pakistan with particular regard to the blasphemy law and rape of Christian girls

: - usually when employed in Muslim houses

: - it renders them un-marriageable in Pakistani society

: - those forced to convert to Islam and marry the Muslim cannot return to their homes

: - they will be killed if they try and 'return' to their true faith

: - their families would be killed by Muslim groups if they accepted the victims back into their homes

: - the incidence of these occurrences is probably wildly under-reported - many do not get to the police stations and courts

: - usually the case is closed after 2 or 3 months

:- usually action is only taken due to pressure resulting from exposure in the International media

: - the perpetrators are usually influential Muslim families who beat the girls to intimidate them

: - if they fall pregnant due to rape, the courts can really do nothing to help at all, even if they wanted to

Here is the article and the video is here but also embedded below :

Where it's even worse.....

In the last post we talked about the latest case of the kidnap of Christian girls and their rape, forced conversion and marriage in Pakistan, and noted that it was happening at the rate of (at least) one a week. Spare a thought for our brothers and sisters, the Copts of Egypt. After the 'Arab Spring' Wahhabi and Salafist movements have mushroomed with funding from Saudi Arabia. These groups are paying Muslims per convert. Unsurprisingly, the rate of abduction has shot up in past while. In one city alone the rate is 2-3 per day. Muslim University students are encouraged to get close to and sexually violate Coptic girls in the age range of 9 to 15. The tactic is to sexually blackmail them and shame them in front of their parents (photographs etc) to coerce them to run away and thus be more vulnerable. They are coerced into converting and marrying.

Salafist groups, police and state security combine to provide a strong infrastructure. The girls are held in houses procured especially for the purpose, the police refuse to pay attention to the girls families. And the Salafi groups have set up a group to deliberately counter and smear the efforts of the Coptic community to get the girls back. The Orwellian titled 'Alliance for the Support of New Muslim Females' has staged against the Coptic church, accusing it of kidnapping girls who have converted to Islam.

This new tactic explains why by far the highest proportion of 'converts' to Islam are from young and underage Coptic women. It can't even be (fully) blamed on normal Islamic practice, since it is deemed alright for the husband, the head of the house, to be a Muslim while his wife isn't. It is only deemed detestable if the 'subservient' wife is a Muslim and the husband is not. Thus these events cannot be about some kind of Romeo-Juliet romances across the religious divide. The goal is not the marriage of in love couples but the open promotion of sexual coercion and blackmail to induce conversion to Islam.

Elements of the security forces, courts, police, University officials and Muslim clergy are openly promoting and facilitating this policy. The supposedly 'pious' Muslims are engaging in mass rape and paedophilia and teaching their followers to do the same.

Even before the Revolution such practices were widespread, with tactics used including telling Christian women that their fathers were seriously ill in hospital and asking for them, and then snatching them off the street as they rushed to the hospital, or straight grabbing them from the street and aneasthatising them, marrying them in this condition, gang raping them for weeks, and then divorcing them. Fathers who protest have been accused of 'promoting sectarian strife' by the police and had their homes stolen from them.

Even where such girls are taken into state care homes (in one recent case it seems the girls claimed that they had freely converted to Islam because they feared retribution from their own families) there is intense intimidation, often with no Christian presence in such institutions, and the machinations of Sharia associations and threatening by Hijab encloaked social workers.

For more information see here, here and here.