Six days after a Pakistani Christian was sentenced to death for blasphemy, the young man’s lawyer says there was insufficient evidence against his client and that the police failed to investigate the matter properly.
Nadeem Masih, 24, from the Yaqoobabad area of the religiously conservative city of Gujrat, in Punjab Province, was judged to have sent four messages via WhatsApp to his Muslim friend which defamed Islam’s prophet, Muhammad. On 14 September, he was fined the equivalent of around $3000 and sentenced to death.
But his lawyer, Riaz Anjum, says there are still unanswered questions from the trial, which was conducted in the prison where Masih was being held, for security reasons – in case of a mob gathering if he was transported elsewhere. According to the first information report (FIR) provided by the police to the court, the first blasphemous text was sent on 23 June 2016, but the complaint by his friend, whom Masih has known since childhood, wasn’t lodged for another 17 days.
“No-one has seen Masih sending messages; hence, it is only hearsay, which is not admissible evidence.” Riaz Anjum
“Messages were sent over a period of time and it took 17 days to lodge the first information report with the police,” Anjum told World Watch Monitor. “If there was provocation, then the response should have been immediate and Yasir Bashir [the complainant] would have gone to the police much earlier.
“During the entire trial, we did not see that Masih wanted to incite his friends over religious differences. If that were the case, then he should have sent these messages to all his friends. So there remains a need to check what really made this happen.”
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