Newsweek: PAKISTAN’S AHMADIS FACE PERSECUTION, THREATS FROM LOCAL MOBS AND THE STATE.
“Are these the people with bullets who took my papa away?” two-year-old Sabiha Ahmad asked her mother anxiously when AFP 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 Nov. 20 when hundreds of people torched a factory in Jhelum after rumors spread workers were burning copies of the Quran.
Sabiha’s father Asif Shahzad was one of the Ahmadi employees—a minority group who are legally declared non-Muslims in Pakistan in 1974—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 is hiding. “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.