Police on Friday took over two dozen members of the Ahmadi community, including children, into “protective custody” as a mob gathered outside their place of worship in Karachi’s Surjani Town.
“Several workers of the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) gathered outside the Ahmadi place of worship in Surjani Town. They demanded to prevent the Ahmadis from offering Friday prayers and using symbols of Islam,” West Zone Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) Irfan Ali Baloch told a leading English Newspaper.
Anticipating a possible law and order situation, he added, police took 25 Ahmadis into protective custody.
Ahmadi community spokesperson Amir Mehmood, on the other hand, did not see it like that. He alleged that police detained 25 Ahmadis, including eight children, and transported them to Khawaja Ajmer Nagri police station.
“For some time, TLP workers gathered outside the worship centre, demanding the arrest and sealing of such places,” he told the newspaper, adding that community members practiced their religious rites within closed buildings and questioned how this could be a crime.
Mehmood declared that detaining Ahmadis from their place of worship for performing their rituals “was a grave violation of human rights and Pakistan’s Constitution” that protected peoples of all faith with the freedom to practice.
However, rejecting Mehmood’s allegation, DIG Baloch said that police would seek “legal opinion” on the place of worship.
The incident allegedly targeting the heavily persecuted Ahmadiyya community of Pakistan is not the first of its kind as it comes weeks after the local administration in Daska, Sialkot, on January 16 demolished an Ahmadiyya place of worship built by former foreign minister Zafarullah Khan years before Pakistan’s independence in 1947.
According to the administration, the demolition was part of an anti-encroachment campaign. A notice was reportedly issued two days prior under the Punjab Local Government Act, claiming that the extension of the structure was illegal because it encroached 13 feet onto a public road.
However, the local Ahmadiyya community asserted that efforts were made to comply with the notice by removing the extended 13 feet on January 15. Despite their claimed compliance, Daska Assistant Commissioner Maham Mushtaq, accompanied by the police, proceeded with the demolition.
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