violence against Christians spread across the Asian nation.
APMA, Pakistan’s leading religious rights group, said a Muslim mob set fire late Sunday, February 19, on two churches at Sukkur, the third largest city of the southern Sindh province, some 480 km (300 miles) north of Karachi.
"The St. Xavier Protestant Church and St. Mary’s Catholic Church buildings [were] ransacked and burnt completely," APMA Chairman Shahbaz Bhatti told BosNewsLife. He said that Bibles and other "sacred Christian material" and books were also destroyed.
There were no reports of serious injuries. Bhatti claimed that the violence broke out following announcements in local mosques that a Christian man desecrated the Koran, regarded as a holy book by Muslims. After hearing the messages a Muslim mob, already outraged over published Prophet Muhammad cartoons, "attacked the Churches and set them on fire."
HOLDING KEROSENE OIL
APMA investigators established that a mob "comprising of mainly Muslim youngsters holding kerosene oil, batons, sticks and guns," attacked the churches while chanting slogans, he added.
Although the parish priest and other local Christians asked police for protection following the announcement in mosques, security forces and fire fighters allegedly arrived too late to prevent the violence.
"The police reached [the area] after approximately an hour and the fire brigade came after two hours of the incident when both the churches were burnt," said Bhatti. Police officials could not be reached for comment, but Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has in the past condemned Muslim "extremism" in the country.
HEAVY POLICE CONTINGENTS
Bhatti also said that after an APMA team contacted government officials to intervene, "rangers and heavy police contingents were sent to the site and further damage was prevented."
He stressed however that his organization has demanded that the government extends security and protection "to the worship places, life and property of Christians of Pakistan as a few elements are trying to spread anarchy in the country."
Bhatti claimed that militants are "taking advantages of protest rallies against the blasphemous [Prohpet Muhammad] cartoons, for their vested interests through provocative speeches and whipping up religious frenzy among the people."
LATEST IN SERIES
The violence was the latest in a series of reported attacks against Christians. Last week thousands of demonstrators in northern Pakistan and Lahore destroyed private and public property, at times targeting Christians.
In Kasur, a violent mob of several thousand Muslims attacked a United Presbyterian girl’s school following weekly prayers on Friday, February 17, while the mob also
tried to attack the city’s Catholic church, news reports said.
“Whenever there is something [to make them angry], then they attack all the Christians and all of the churches,” Priest Yaqoob Barkat said in published remarls. Christians comprise less than 3 percent of the country’s over 162-million, predominantly Muslim, population, according to the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). (With BosNewsLife Research, BosNewsLife’s Stefan J. Bos and reports from Pakistan).
