Glasgow: A UK-based human rights organisation is calling on the authorities in Pakistan to release a 72-year-old doctor who was arrested for ‘posing as a Muslim’ after being secretly filmed by a patient at his surgery.
Global Minorities Alliance, a Glasgow-based human rights organisation which advocates for the rights of minority communities the world over, denounced the imprisonment as a further example of Pakistan’s strict blasphemy laws being used to persecute minorities and whip up religious hatred rather than seek justice in a country which is increasingly being divided by violence.
Mr Masood Ahmad, a member of the Ahmadiyya community, was charged under Pakistan’s anti-Ahmadiyya blasphemy legislation after a religious leader posing as a patient attended his homeopathy clinic in Lahore and secretly recorded him reading a verse from the Quran.
Mr Ahmad, who has dual Pakistani/UK nationality and previously lived in London, was arrested shortly after and is now in prison awaiting trial. He has been refused bail and there have been calls from the angry mobs that gathered outside the courthouse for him to face the death penalty.
“In the past the police and the courts generally did not accept such accusations where the accuser had himself approached an Ahmadi at his home or job to discuss faith matters,” said a spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan. “It is noteworthy that while the political leadership repeatedly condemns sectarianism and extremism in public, it encourages its law officers to upgrade and intensify religious prosecution of Ahmadis.”
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