Pakistan claims that police killed a doctor who was charged with blasphemy on purpose.
Pakistan’s government has said police orchestrated the killing of a doctor who was in custody having been accused of blasphemy. Officers then lied about the circumstances of his death, claiming he was killed in a shootout between police and armed men, a provincial minister said.
The statement marks the first time the government has accused security forces of what the doctor’s family and rights groups have said amounted to an extrajudicial killing carried out by police.
The doctor, Shah Nawaz, from the southern Sindh province, had given himself up to police last week in the district of Mirpur Khas after assurances that he would be given a chance to prove his innocence.
Days earlier, in the city of Umerkot, a mob claimed he insulted the prophet Muhammad and shared blasphemous content on social media, and demanded his arrest. The mob also burned Nawaz’s clinic.
According to the provincial interior minister, Ziaul Hassan, a government investigation concluded that Nawaz was killed shortly after he gave himself up to authorities in a “fake encounter” engineered by the security forces.
There was no shootout with armed men as police had claimed, Hassan told reporters at a news conference in the southern port city of Karachi. He said Nawaz’s family would be able to file murder charges against the police officers said to have killed him.
Hours after Nawaz was shot and his body was handed over to his family, a mob snatched it from Nawaz’s father and burned it.
Accusations of blasphemy, and sometimes even just rumours, can spark riots and mob rampages in Pakistan. Although killings of blasphemy suspects by mobs are common, extrajudicial killings by police are rare.
Under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam or Islamic religious figures can be sentenced to death, though authorities have yet to carry out a death sentence for blasphemy.
Nawaz’s father, Mohammad Saleh, thanked the government for backing the family and demanded that his son’s killers face justice according to the eye-for-an-eye concept under sharia law.
“We have only one demand: those police officers who staged the killing of my son … must also be killed in the same manner,” Saleh said.
Nawaz’s mother, Rehmat Kunbar, said: “Those who killed my son should be punished quickly so that others learn a lesson and not indulge in extrajudicial killings in the future.”
Nawaz’s killing was the second case of an extrajudicial killing by police this month in Pakistan. A week before, an officer opened fire inside a police station in the south-western city of Quetta, fatally wounding Syed Khan, a suspect held on accusations of blasphemy.
Khan had been arrested after officers rescued him from an enraged mob that claimed he had insulted Islam’s prophet. He was killed by a police officer, Mohammad Khurram, who was quickly arrested. The tribe and the family of the slain man later said they had pardoned the officer.
