A lawyer has been arrested for providing a teenager with a pistol used to kill in a Pakistani court a US citizen accused of blasphemy, an extremely sensitive issue in Pakistan, police sources said Wednesday (August 19th).
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On July 29, the assassination of Tahir Ahmad Nasim in Peshawar, the capital of the North West, sparked outrage in the United States, the State Department calling on the Pakistani authorities to shed light on this matter as well as to " immediately reform their abusive blasphemy laws ".
The victim, a member of the Ahmadi community - a branch of Islam unrecognized in Pakistan because its followers believe in a prophet after Muhammad, which makes them heretics for the more conservative - was killed in court while 'he was under police escort. According to police officer Lalzada Khan, lawyer Tufail Khan, accused of " allegedly providing a pistol to the assassin to kill Nasim ", was " brought before a judge " and " remanded in custody for three days " .
Demonstrations in support of the assassin
The 17-year-old killer confessed to his crime and claims that Khan gave him the weapon, according to the police officer. Information confirmed by a police officer, according to which the victim had dual Pakistani-American nationality. Blasphemy is a hot issue in Pakistan, where even unproven allegations of offending Islam can lead to assassinations and lynchings.
The acquittal at the end of October 2018 of Christian Asia Bibi, who had spent more than eight years on death row for blasphemy, which she has always denied, had provoked violent protests across Pakistan. Asia Bibi now lives in Canada with her family. According to Washington, Tahir Ahmad Nasim was " lured to Pakistan " in 2018 by people who then " used Pakistani blasphemy laws to trap him ."
After his death, major protests were held in Pakistan in support of his killer. Photos circulated showing elite police officers posing with him in a van after his arrest. According to the American International Commission for Religious Freedoms, some 80 people are jailed for blasphemy in Pakistan, half of whom are sentenced to life imprisonment or the death penalty. No convict of blasphemy has so far been executed there.