Christian student 21 months ago, BosNewsLife monitored Thursday, January 19.
Christian news agency Compass Direct said police in Pakistan’s Punjab region arrested the cleric, Umar Hayat, on suspicion that he and two other Islamic seminary members had tortured Javed Anjum for five days in the town of Toba Tek Singh. Another suspect, Maulvi Ghulam Rasool, was reportedly re-arrested in November after Pakistan’s Supreme Court revoked his bail.
Judge Javed Iqbal Warraich also ordered police protection for Anjum’s father, Pervez Masih, and his lawyer, after Masih filed a formal complaint that armed members of Rasool and Hayat’s madrassa (Islamic school) were harassing him at court hearings, Compass Direct reported.
In a videotaped statement from his death bed, 19-year-old Anjum said he had been nabbed by members of the madrassa, including the principal when he stopped to get water from the seminary’s water tap on his way to a wedding.
After learning he was a Christian, the seminarians allegedly beat him and applied electrical shocks to his ears for five days, until he eventually repeated the Muslim creed. "I was searching for water near the Islamic madrassa when the Maulvis [Islamic teachers or mullahs] took me inside and told me that I was a thief and was trying to steal the water pump," he said according to a transcript released by religious rights group Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW).
REJECTING CHARGE
"I rejected the charge and told the Islamic leaders that I am a Christian youth and a student [who] had come here to attend a marriage. As soon as the Islamic extremists came to know that I am Christian, they asked me to convert to Islam," he added.
His statement contradicts those of Madrassa students who turned Anjum over to police, claiming they had caught the young man trying to steal the school’s water pump. Suffering from 26 wounds, including a broken arm and fingers, fingernails ripped off, skin burns and
serious injuries to his bladder and kidneys, Anjum was immediately committed to a local hospital.
The third-year commerce student died of his wounds in Faisalabad’s Allied Hospital on May 2, 2004. Hours later police arrested Rasool and after nine days of police interrogation, the madrassa guard and prayer leader named Mohammed Tayyab and Hayat as his accomplices.
Authorities are holding both Hayat and Rasool in Jhang Sudr jail, 22 miles (35.2 kilometers) from Toba Tek Singh. Tayyab, a madrassa teacher, has been free on bail since December 2004, Compass Direct reported.
INFORMAL TIES
Rasool’s madrassa has informal ties to the outlawed Islamic fundamentalist group Sipah-e-Sahaba, according to local sources in Toba Tek Singh who requested anonymity, Compass Direct claimed. The organization was one of five extremist groups banned by President Pervez Musharraf in January 2002, but has reportedly continued to function under other names.
After it was discovered that one of the July 7 London bombers had spent time studying at a Pakistani madrassa, President Musharraf promised to deport the approximately 1,400 foreign students studying in Islamic seminaries across the country. He also demanded that all 13,000
of Pakistan’s madrassas register by the end of the 2005.
But in recent weeks the government has backed down from its ultimatum, allowing foreign students to renew their visas and extending the deadline for madrassa registration.
The government compromise came after many seminaries refused to remove foreigners saying these attempts to expel foreign students forcibly "could enrage the rest of our students, which would make it difficult to for us to control them effectively," a leader of Pakistan’s madrassa coalition, the Ittehad Tanzimat Madaris Deeniya, was quoted as saying on January 4 by the Daily Times.
Tensions also rose after the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) bombed sites of suspected Muslim militants in Pakistan last week, reportedly killing at least three senior al-Qaeda members, including someone believed to be related to the second in command to Osama bin Laden, (With BosNewsLife Research and reports from Pakistan).
