World Watch Monitor | Aug. 28, 2018
A Pakistani family seeks justice almost two months after their 22 year old son was falsely accused of abducting a 19 year old woman, which led in turn to the looting and ransacking of Christians’ houses.
Early on 9 July, Nabeela Bibi of Rahimabad village (78/RB), Sheikhupura, went missing; her father Muhammad Hanif said he suspected she’d eloped with her next-door neighbor, 22-year-old Christian Waheed Masih.
“All the Muslim residents flared up and shouted at us saying they would burn our houses and cut us into pieces,” Waheed’s brother Nasir Masih told World Watch Monitor.
The village has only 10 Christian families: most of them are bonded laborers in brick kilns; others work as janitors in different cities. So most of their men had already left when the incident took place.
The Christians assured everyone that they had no idea where Nabeela had gone, but no one believed them and the situation kept getting more tense all day.
Nasir told WWM: “The mob took my mother and beat her publicly. Someone alerted the police, who rescued her from the mob but then took her into custody to pressure us to produce Waheed at the police station. I eventually brought Waheed back (early on 10 July) and presented him before the Muslims of the area….