A Christian man was hospitalized in critical conditions after a mob accused him of having burned pages of the Quran and tried to lynch him.
The incident of May 25 in Sargodha, Punjab, Pakistan, has generated strong domestic and even international reactions by Christian and human rights leaders. On May 26 and 27, Christians took to the streets to protest in several different Pakistani cities. It is because of these reactions that police acted with unusual quickness and arrested more than 100 suspects, which may have been part of the mob that tried to lynch 74-year-old Christian Nazeer Masih Gill, accusing him of blasphemy and burning his shoe factory.
The arrests are good news, but they should be followed by serious prosecution. As Monsignor Joseph Arshad, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, and other Christian religious authorities commented, justice is not guaranteed in Pakistan. It is often the case that when the news disappears from the first page of the media those arrested are quietly released.
Information received by “Bitter Winter” add details important to understand how false accusations of blasphemy are fabricated and why. The victim is from a well-known local Christian family, but it appears that his real “crime” was to have developed a successful business. His shoe factory was expanding, which generated the envy of his competitors and neighbors. Nazeer Gill had bought (and regularly paid) shops near his factory to expand his business. Local Muslim businessmen (who are among those arrested) wanted him to give them back and resented the factory’s success.
They decided to play the blasphemy card. According to Nazeer Gill’s family, he was burning some waste outside his factory when some “hidden hand” threw in the fire pages from the Quran, then gathered a mob screaming that blasphemy was being committed. According to the police, activists from the ultra-fundamentalist Islamic group Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan had been pre-alerted and were there ready to intervene. The mob got hold of Nazeer Gill and started beating him mercilessly. They also set fire to the factory.
His relatives and factory workers called the police, which sent a heavy contingent and managed to rescue Nazeer Gill after a brawl with the mob, but not before he had been beaten so badly that he remains in serious conditions at the hospital, and the shoe factory had been largely burned down.
As in other cases, fabricated blasphemy charges instigated by competitors became a tool to “punish” Christians for their success in business.
