Source: Tribune

ISLAMABAD: “Are these the people with bullets who took my papa away?” two-year-old Sabiha Ahmad asked her mother anxiously whenAFP visited her family, members of Pakistan’s persecuted Ahmadi minority, who are currently living in hiding.

The toddler’s family has had little contact with anyone since they were forced to flee for their lives on November 20 when hundreds of people torched a factory in the eastern city of Jhelum after rumours spread workers were burning copies of the Holy Quran.

Sabiha’s father Asif Shahzad was one of the employees — all Ahmadis, a minority group who are legally declared non-Muslims in Pakistan for their belief in a prophet after Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) — and that night the mob took him away.

“I begged them for the life of my wife and children and they freed them only after taking me to burn in the factory’s boiler,” he told AFP this week from where his family are hiding.

PHOTO: AFP

“It was my good luck that some kind-hearted Muslims helped me to escape,” he said. His wife Hafsa said she had almost accepted him dead.

“I never wanted to leave him but he said that he would join us if he survived, and I must save mine and our daughters’ lives,” the 24-year-old told AFP tearfully.

Along with other Ahmadi families fleeing Jhelum that night, Hafsa managed to escape in a car her husband had arranged before he was torn away by the mob.

The driver, she said, was Muslim. “(He) treated me and the other ladies… as his daughters,” she said, navigating them through the mob to safety.

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