ICC Note:

In Pakistan, blasphemy has become one of the key tools of persecution against religious minorities, including Christians. Because of the unfavorable government position towards non-Muslim minorities, it is easy to accuse someone of blasphemy and send them to prison. Often, mobs will punish those accused of blasphemy on their own without waiting for government intervention. While religious minorities, especially Christians, incur most blasphemy accusations, a few Muslims have also been accused of blasphemy. Pakistani Christians have expressed frustration at the different treatment Muslims accused of blasphemy receive compared to Christians accused of blasphemy.

3/29/2017 Pakistan (UCA News) – When a Muslim man who burned a Quran was declared “mentally unstable” by police in the central Pakistani city of Muzaffargarh was beaten, local Christians said they would have faced much harsher treatment if the culprit had been a had been Christian.

Unrest gripped a Christian village in Muzaffargarh district, after local Muslims found Sajjad Hussain Awan burning pages of the Islamic holy book outside a mosque. Awan was detained and beaten March 25 before being handed over to police.

Local Christians joined in the protests and blocked roads for six hours condemning the burning of the Quran. Some 25 police officers were deployed in the area for three days.

However, police said Awan burned the pages of the Quran by accident. “Apparently, he is mentally unstable. He has a hobby of burning papers. It was cold at night and he mistakenly took the holy pages as scrap,” Ayyaz Ahmad Khan Pattafi, station house officer at Rangpur police station, told ucanews.com.

However, local Christians pointed out that had the culprit had been Christian, things would have been different. Allegations of insulting Prophet Mohammed and desecrating the Quran have sparked violent incidents before in Pakistan and the country’s blasphemy laws have been used as a pretext for attacking Christians.

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