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Raid kills 8 in sect in Pakistan

New York Times, via the International Herald Tribune, USA
Oct. 7, 2005
Salman Massood
www.iht.com

ReligionNewsBlog.com • Saturday October 8, 2005

ISLAMABAD At least eight people were killed and 20 wounded Friday in an attack on a congregation of a minority Muslim sect in central Pakistan.

The attack on the Qadiani sect, also known as Ahmadis and considered heretics by orthodox Muslims, has raised fresh concerns about the protection of minorities in Pakistan, a majority Sunni Muslim state.

Pakistan has been racked by sectarian clashes between the Shiite minority and the Deobandi sect, a puritanical branch of Sunni Islam. The tit-for-tat clashes have resulted in hundreds of deaths on both sides over the last decade. But Christians and Qadianis have also been persecuted and attacked by religious extremists over the years.

President Pervez Musharraf has repeatedly vowed since the terrorist attacks on the United States of Sept. 11, 2001, to rid the county of extremism and sectarianism. However, attacks of a sectarian and religious nature remain frequent and deadly.

The attack Friday, the second day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, took place when about 40 Qadianis had gathered for morning prayers in the village of Mong in Punjab Province, south of Islamabad, the capital, witnesses said.

Two people, their faces hidden by black hoods, stormed into the building and opened fire, killing two others on the spot, Masood Ahmed Raja, a cardiologist, said by telephone.

“I was saved by the angels,” Raja said.

He had been unable to join a prayer session at the mosque because he had been called away to care for a patient. On returning to the mosque, he said he saw two men running away and escaping with a third man on a motorcycle.

The police said that six of the victims died at a hospital and that two critically wounded people were moved to Lahore, the provincial capital.

Of the estimated 10 million members of the Qadiani community worldwide, between three million and four million live in Pakistan, mostly in Punjab. Mirza Ghulam Ahmed founded the sect in 1889, calling himself a prophet. This enraged other Muslims because it challenged a basic precept of Islam: that Muhammad was the final prophet.

A constitutional amendment introduced by the government of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1974 declared Qadiani to be a non-Muslim minority. In 1984, Pakistan’s last military dictator, General Zia ul Haq, made it a criminal offense for Qadiani to call themselves Muslims, to employ Muslim terms and appellations associated with Muhammad, to use Muslim practices of worship or to propagate their faith.

“We condemn this attack,” Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse. “Any act of violence in which innocent people are killed should be condemned.”

Human rights activists have long campaigned for the protection of religious minorities in Pakistan, where religious extremism and intolerance threaten to tear the social fabric of society.

The head of the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance condemned the attack and accused the government of failing to protect minorities, The Associated Press reported.