Sharing Life Ministries Pakistan (SLMP) said Protestant pastor Munir Phool has been refused entry to Kasur city’s district jail in Punjab province, Christian news agency Compass Direct News reported.
The pastor conducted visits since June 25, when Catholic prisoner Dil Awaiz was put in a high-security cell and tortured, said SLMP. Awaiz, from the Christian village of Clarkabad, has been jailed since June 2005 on charges of assisting his brother in a 2002 murder.
The SLMP has questioned the evidence, and indirectly suggested that the trial may have been religiously motivated.
PASTOR BANNED
Pakistani police denied that Phool was banned from visiting the jail on Sundays and ending Bible classes. Phool said Awaiz was among those targeted by a former jail deputy superintendent who allegedly abused Christian prisoners.
Awaiz, 33, was quoted as saying that Muslim inmates became angry on June 25 when a Christian prisoner drank from one of their water glasses. Many lower-income Muslims in Pakistan consider Christians unclean and refuse to share eating utensils and other physical objects with them, human rights watchers say.
Awaiz reportedly said that the deputy superintendent responded by forcing the Christian man to drink out of a glass used for cleaning toilets. He allegedly also beat him and threw the pastor in a high-security cell, depriving the church leader of contact with other Christian prisoners.
The remaining Christian inmates, 55 out of approximately 2,000 prisoners in the jail, were forced to discontinue their Bible classes since none of them could read or write, SLMP said in published remarks.
JAIL STAFF
Jail staff members placed Christian prisoner Munir Rehmat, 39, into a high-security cell several days later after he inquired about resuming Bible classes, Phool said. The pastor said that both Awaiz and Rehmat remain in high-security detention but are well physically, Compass Direct News reported.
Kasur District Jail Superintendent Mohsin Rafeeq said he could not remember the exact details of the incident. In a separate report the SLMP said Mian Faheem, a new jail superintendent at Faisalabad’s Borstal Institute and Juvenile Prison, was singling out 13 juvenile Christian prisoners to clean the prison toilets.
The developments added to concern among human rights groups about what they see as widespread persecution of non Muslim believers in the Asian nation where Christians also face blasphemy trials, BosNewsLife monitored.
Persecution of Christians carried out by Muslim militants in and outside prisons in Pakistan apparently increased since the September 11 attacks against the United States, human rights groups say. (With BosNewsLife Research).
