Anti-Ahmadi extremism on the rise in Pakistan

INTERNATIONAL DESK: Unidentified suspects have desecrated Ahmadi graves in Pakistan Punjab, it has emerged, media reports said.

The suspects desecrated four grave headstones and inscribed anti-Ahmadi slurs on them, Friday Times reported.

The incident occured in Premkot, Hafizabad, on November 22, but came to light after, according to the Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya.

Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya spokesperson Aamir Mehmood said the incident took place at the same graveyard where Punjab Police had reportedly desecrated 45 graves of community members earlier in February. He said the “heart-wrenching” incident was representative of rising intolerance in Pakistan.

“Forget living Ahmadis, even our dead are not spared,” he said, Friday Times reported.

Pakistan’s tiny Ahmadi community is routinely subjected to discrimination which often enjoys legal and state sanction.

An Ahmadi man was booked by Karachi police under the nation’s Ahmadiyya-specific penal provisions for using �Syed’ as a prefix earlier in the same month. The suspect, a lawyer, had been representing other Ahmadis before a court. The man had submitted some documents in connection with the case. The documents, it has been claimed, featured Islamic terms. His name featured alongside.

A school in Punjab’s Attock district expelled four Ahmadi students over their confession earlier in September.

A relative of the students, said they had been expelled for simply being Ahmadi. He said a class fellow of one of the students had been harassing one of the students for some time. The students were expelled after some parents prevailed on school principal Kulsoom Awan, Friday Times reported. (Asian Lite)