BANGKOK – “We are so happy this day to be released,” said Haraan Sidique, boarding a bus at Bangkok’s Suan Plu Immigration Detention Center (IDC) on Monday morning after spending almost 7 months at a refugee prison in central Bangkok.
Sidique is one of 96 Ahmadiyya refugees from Pakistan who have been released from detention by Thai authorities, a landmark development in a country that does not formally recognize refugees despite the fact that it is currently coming to the end of its tenure as president of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. The released Ahmadiyya are members of a minority Muslim group that is oppressed in Pakistan, where they are not recognized as Muslims and are often victims of sectarian violence.
As women carried infants and ushered older children toward the waiting buses, males in the group thanked Thai officials and police at the IDC, all clearly relieved at being released. Watching as the group made their way from the jail across a heavily-policed courtyard, Dr Iftikhar Ahmad Ayaz, a U.K-based Ahmadiyya representative, reminded reporters of what he described as “intense and severe persecution” of Ahmadiyya in Pakistan, where he says they “are denied their basic civil and political rights.”
Categories: Ahmadiyyat: True Islam, Asia, Human Rights, Thailand
We can see on the impressions of the family that they had a very hard time. May Allah grant them a great future!