JARANWALA: A mob attacked and desecrated a church in this town in Pakistan’s Punjab province’s city of Faisalabad (originally Lyallpur) on Wednesday and ransacked and burned homes of Christians here on the pretext that two Christian pastors had blasphemed against the Quran and Islam in general.
The police did eventually reach the scene of the carnage was allowed to run its full course, and the local top cop tried to defuse the mob’s frenzy in a public announcement. Local mullah’s stood alongside the district police officer to quell the riot and when the police officer told the mob that only a court of law would punish the alleged blasphemers if they were indeed found guilty, the mob shouted back that not a court but they the mob would lynch the two suspects.
HLCP and Pakistan Masiha Millat Party: Chairman of Human Liberation Commission of Pakistan (HLCP) and also Chairman of the political Pakistan Masiha Millat Party (PMMP) Aslam Parvez Sahotra, was at the scene of the commencement of the crime in Jaranwala almost as soon as it was scaling down and reported that he’d spoken to locals and tried to defuse the situation.
Mr. Sahotra reported that the carnage did not stop in Jaranwala town but spread to surrounding villages that he immediately toured for a first-hand assessment of the carnage, such as Chak 240 GB ‑ said to be the ancestral village of Senator Rana Maqbool, one time Inspector General of Punjab Police ‑ where the mob set fire to two churches, set alight Christians’ homes and ransacked and plundered them, running away with ceiling and pedestal fans, Tv sets, irons, washing machines and any other valuable household goods they could lay their hands on.
HRCP: The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) immediately responded to the vigilante “justice” in the following statement to the press:-
“The mob-led assault on Christian families and their homes and sites of worship in Jaranwala, Faisalabad, following allegations of blasphemy, must be condemned in no uncertain terms. The frequency and scale of such attacks—which are systematic, violent and often uncontainable—appear to have increased in the last several years.
Not only has the state failed to protect its religious minorities, but it has also allowed the far right to permeate and fester within society and politics. Both the perpetrators and instigators of this violence must be identified and punished to the full extent of the law. The government must waste no time in raising and equipping special police forces to protect religious minorities’ sites of worship as directed by the 2014 Supreme Court judgment.”
