Judge Rao Abdel Jabar reportedly agreed to preside the blasphemy hearing against Martha Bibi Masih, a married mother with six children, in the district capital of Kasur, 45 kilometers (28 miles) south of Lahore.
In published remarks, defense lawyer Ezra Shujat said police arrested Masih January 22 after
a violent mob stormed her house in the village of Kot Nanka Singh. The riot was prompted by claims that Masih made insulting remarks about Islam’s founder – a crime punishable by death under controversial Pakistani law – during a quarrel with a neighbor.
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Masih remains behind bars in Kasur’s district jail, while her husband and five children have gone into hiding to avoid a revenge attack, Christians said. “They are afraid and worried now,”
Shujat said in a published statement. “They can’t work anywhere.”
BLASPHEMY LEGIZLATION
Under Pakistan’s current blasphemy legislation, people can be send to death if found guilty
of defiling Muhammad. Although death sentences have been overturned by higher courts, at least 23 people suspected of blasphemy have been murdered, Christians say.
News reports said police requested her case be transferred to Kasur to prevent a “law and order situation,” amid growing tensions in her home town. Investigators of the advocacy group All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA) told BosNewsLife earlier that the problems began last month when Marti Bibi asked for money from Muslim men working in the Mosque with material they rented from her husband’s construction shop.
The men allegedly refused to pay the rent and instead started to beat her, APMA said, citing local sources in the region, an area where about 12 Christian families live among 500 Muslim families. "On the intervention of local passersby, she was freed and returned home," APMA said, before being arrested later in the day by local police.
FREE AID
APMA lawyers have been providing free legal aid to Martha Bibi and the group is assisting the family. The case has underscored international concern about blasphemy legislation in Pakistan.
A Pakistani official said January 23, that Islamabad wants to reform its controversial blasphemy law, just days after a mentally-ill Christian and a Christian teenager were released from prison. Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed reportedly promised the law, would be changed after a general election due late this year or early 2008.
In the meantime however, Christians are in hiding amid ongoing arrests and detentions local Christians and human rights groups say. (With BosNewsLife reports and BosNewsLife Research).
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