Mahmood stated that the attacker was a student of a religious seminary in the same locality and the student’s teacher is known for being involved in a hate speech campaign against their community
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Two men who belonged to the Ahmadiyya community were shot dead by a 19-year-old religious student in Phalia tehsil of Mandi Bahauddin district, Pakistan. Community spokesperson Aamir Mahmood told Dawn, that the shooting incident took place on Saturday afternoon in the same locality. There was only a 20-minute difference between the two killings.
Mahmood stated that the attacker was a student of a religious seminary in the same locality and the student’s teacher is known for being involved in a hate speech campaign against their community.
The two victims in the case were 64-year-old Ghulam Sarwar and 30-year-old Rahat Ahmad Bajwa, Dawn reported. Mehmood mentioned that when locals informed the police about the incidents the authorities chased the suspect and arrested him immediately.
The culprit confesses his crimes
Mandi Bahauddin District Police Officer (DPO) Ahmad Mohyyuddin told Dawn, that police recovered the pistol after the attacker was caught. The suspect Ali Raza confessed that he killed the two members of the minority community.
The 19-year-old claimed that he had listened to different speeches against the minority community on social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook which influenced him to carry out the killings. The DPO informed that the teenager wanted to kill “every Ahmadi”.
He also mentioned that a case was registered against the suspect under terrorism charges and maintained that the police are also looking into the involvement of other people in the case. However, it is important to note that this is not the first time, Ahmadis faced persecution at the hands of radical Muslims.
Who are the Ahmadiyyas?
The Ahmadiyyas believe that the Messiah Ghulam Ahmad lived after Islam’s prophet Muhammad and insist that they are part of Islam. The minority group was declared as non-Muslim in Pakistan in 1974 by former PM Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.
Since then, the group has been facing both legal and social discrimination in the Islamic country, and the attacks on their properties have increased manifold in the past decade. It is pertinent to note that the Islamization of Pakistan, which political analysts say started during former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government in the 1970s, went on to culminate in the 1980s under the former military dictator General Zia ul-Haq’s draconian regime.
It was during Haq’s era that the Ahmadis were banned from calling themselves Muslims. They were also barred from opening mosques in the country and their existing places of worship were brutally shut down or desecrated by hard-line Islamists with the support of the state.
According to Pakistan’s National Commission for Human Rights, more than 280 Ahmadis were killed in targeted violence from 1984 to September 2023. Another 415 faced assaults, 51 Ahmadia worship places were damaged, 39 were set on fire and 18 were forcibly occupied besides 46 others that were sealed by the authorities.
The atrocities go beyond Pakistan
Interestingly, Pakistan is not the only Muslim-majority country where Ahmadis face systematic persecution. In South Asia itself, Bangladeshi Ahmadis also face discrimination and a similar situation also exists in Indonesia.
Most of Indonesia’s over 200 million Muslims are Sunnis. There are an estimated 100,000 Shiites and 400,000 Ahmadis who were declared “deviant” by Indonesia’s top Islamic body in 2008.
Ahmadi leaders in Indonesia have constantly complained that the members of the community have been intimidating and terrorised since 2005 and their prayers and activities have been banned in several areas across the country. Not only this, the Ahmadis can not even get help from courts in the country if they are discriminated against on religious grounds.
With inputs from agencies.