Sunday, July 9, after being granted bail on controversial medical grounds.
In published comments, 19-year-old Ribqa Masih said she was "afraid to go outside" as the man, identified as Muhammad Kashif, was living a few blocks away.
Ten months after she was reportedly raped, Masih is apparently unable to finish her study and follow her dream of becoming a medical doctor. "I’m afraid to go outside. Mentally, I’ve been too disturbed to study," she told a reporter of Compass Direct, a Christian news agency investigating reported cases of persecution. In addition her father has been threatened and her younger siblings harassed by Muslims at the local school, news reports said.
Masih had finished her high school examinations and was awaiting the results in September 2005 when wealthy Muslims living nearby in the town of Gorala kidnapped and raped her, she said. Ten months later, Masih, 19, still needs to retake two of the tests.
She told a court that Kashif and another man, Ghulam Abbas Hussain, took her to a house after awaiting her arrival in the city of Faisalabad, an important industrial centre located in Punjab province west of Lahore, where they raped her throughout the night after giving her drugs. They apparently threatened to shoot her and to kill the rest of her family if she did not repeat the Islamic creed, an act if done in the presence of two Muslims is considered a valid form of conversion to Islam.
REFUSING TO CONVERT
Masih refused to convert, saying that she "would rather die" than change her religion, Police eventually detained the attackers, but Kashif was granted bail because he allegedly suffers from psoriasis, an immune-mediated disease which affects the skin and joints.
However "psoriasis did not stop him from raping Masih," said Khalil Tahir Sindhu, Masih’s lawyer. Nor did it keep Kashif from fleeing police in a Faisalabad courtroom last October when his initial request for pre-arrest bail was rejected, observers said.
Last month the same court denied bail to Ghulam Abbas Hussain, the other man accused of raping Masih. Court procedures have also begun against two other people, Masih’s Muslim friend Humaira Hussain and her mother, as they had invited Masih to the city of Faisalabad are were allegedly facilitated the rape, Both have reportedly been released on bail.
WOMEN FEAR REPRISALS
Masih is one of the few women who came forward as families often turn their back to rape victims, human rights watchers said. Near Masih’s home village, another woman from a religious minority struggled to prosecute police officers she claimed abducted and raped her. Sonia Naz made international headlines in August 2005, going public with her rape allegedly at the hands of Faisalabad police.
Since then, the Ahmadi woman’s alleged rapists, including the Faisalabad superintendent of police, have been released on bail. Naz’s husband divorced her, and her in-laws rejected her because of the “disgrace” she had brought on the family, Pakistani press reported.
But Masih’s family has supported her instead of disowning her, However "I’ve realized now that if a girl leaves home for only a single night, the respect she had before she will never get back," Masih reportedly said. The government has promised to crackdown on Muslim extremism and violence against women.
FOUR MEN HANGED
Last month four Muslim men were hanged after being convicted for gang-raping a young Christian woman. The execution in a maximum security prison in Faisalabad took place after President Pervez Musharraf rejected the men’s pleas for mercy.
There is concern that rape is increasingly used as a weapon against Christians. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has recorded 207 cases of gang-rape in Pakistan during 2005. Human rights watchers reported 2,412 abductions of women and children nationwide in last year.
Christians comprise less than three percent of Pakistan’s predominantly Muslim population of roughly 166 million people, according to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). (With BosNewsLife Research and reports from Pakiatan).
