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11-year-old Christian boy has been found in Pakistan’s Punjab province (published in Express tribune) 24TH AUGUST 2012

With the hysteria over the arrest of a Christian girl with Down’s syndrome on a charge of blasphemy yet to blow over, the brutally tortured body of an 11-year-old Christian boy has been found in Pakistan’s Punjab province. The body of Samuel Yaqoob, was discovered with his lips and nose cut off, his stomach removed and his legs mutilated. According to police the body was later burned and could hardly be recognized.Relatives identified the corpse from a distinctive mark on the boy’s forehead. Yaqoob, a resident of the Christian Colony of Faisalabad, had been missing since August 20, last seen on his way to a local market. His mutilated remains were found on Eid-Ul-Fitr holiday, which marks the end of the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan. Detectives are investigating whether accusations of blasphemy had previously been filed against the minor. Yaquub was believed to be an orphan, but The Telegraph reports that his mother was quoted in the local press denying any allegations were made. "We neither received any phone call for ransom nor were we told that Samuel had committed blasphemy," she said. When a Christian group is suspected of transgressing the blasphemy laws, the consequences can be brutal, reports the World Public Forum NGO. The death of the 11-year-old comes a week after a young Christian girl with Down’s syndrome was charged with blasphemy after reportedly burning pages of a Koran. Rifta Masih was beaten by local Muslims after they witnessed her allegedly torching pages of the sacred book when cooking. Several hundred Christians have fled their homes following the incident in fear of violence after local mosques reported the alleged incident over loudspeakers, and hundreds of Muslims taken to the streets. In Pakistan, those accused of blasphemy are subject to instant imprisonment and most are denied bail to prevent mob violence. As a rule, the accused are placed in solitary confinement for their own protection against harassment from inmates or guards. Those that have been acquitted from the charges, often leave the country, one of the strictest enforcers of Sharia law in the world, reports the Washington Post. In Pakistan, slandering Islam or its holy book is punishable by death. There have been no executions for blasphemy, though Asia Bibi, a mother of five and a Christian, was sentenced to death two years ago. Bibi has not been executed as of yet, and may be pardoned of her death sentence. Christian minister Shahbaz Bhatti and Pakistani government politician Salmaan Taseer were both assassinated for opposing the blasphemy laws in connection with Bibi’s case. Last month, a man accused of desecrating a Koran was dragged from a police station by a mob and beaten to death. According to Human Rights Watch researcher Ali Dyan Hasan, "The [country’s blasphemy] law creates this legal infrastructure which is then used in various informal ways to intimidate, coerce, harass and persecute."

Torture took another life away (APRIL 2012) PUBLISHED IN "THE NATION"

Fakhra Younus, who committed suicide aged 33, gave a face to the thousands of Pakistani women who are disfigured as a result of acid attacks, typically carried out by husbands who accuse their wives of dishonouring them; her attacker has not been brought to justice.
Born to a heroin-addicted mother on Napier Road in Karachi’s red-light district, probably in 1978, Fakhra Younus was 18 and working as a “dancing girl” (a euphemism for a prostitute) when she met Bilal Khar, a former Member of the Provincial Assembly of Punjab and son of a former Punjab governor, Ghulam Mustafa Khar.
The Khar family owns vast swathes of farmland in the province and is a major political force in Pakistan. A cousin of Bilal’s is Pakistan’s current Foreign Minister, Hina Rabbani Khar.
When he met Fakhra, Bilal Khar had already been married and divorced three times and was married at the time to a fourth wife with whom he had two children, facts of which Fakhra was unaware.
The two married after six months, but, by her account, her husband subjected her to a sustained campaign of sexual, physical and verbal abuse from the very start that lasted three years before she eventually escaped and moved back to live with her mother. But her peace did not last long.
On the afternoon of May 14, 2000, she was disturbed by an intruder. She later said that she had been asleep in her drawing room when she heard a man’s voice telling her: “Fakhra... Fakhra wake up!”
“I jerked as he held me by my hair and opened my mouth. Because I resisted, he couldn’t get me to swallow. But then he threw something on me. At first I thought it was a joke. I did not understand what had happened to me. Then he left, so I ran after him. My house was on the second floor and by the time I got to the first floor, I realised I could not see.”
Feeling her clothes melting to her body, she collapsed on the floor, screaming. By the time the acid had done its work, the hair had been burned off her head; her lips had fused together; her left ear was obliterated; she had been blinded in one eye; and her breasts had melted to the bone.
She could breathe only with extreme difficulty. When her four-year-old son, Nauman, first visited her in a crowded public hospital, where she remained for the next three months, he ran away crying.
Fakhra’s family sought to prosecute Khar for attempted murder and the case came to court in 2003. Although four witnesses testified to seeing him enter Fakhra’s home on the day of the attack, all later retracted their statements.
They had complained of receiving death threats, but the judge in the case took no notice and in December 2003, he dismissed the charges.
Khar continued to protest his innocence, claiming the perpetrator was a pimp with whom his wife had been having an affair.
After her release from hospital, Fakhra Younus found that she had become a liability to her family, for whom she had once been a source of income.
She and her son were subsequently taken in by Tehmina Durrani, a stepmother of Bilal’s and a women’s rights activist who had chronicled “the Khars’ way of treating women” in her book My Feudal Lord, in which she described the abuse meted out to her by her ex-husband, Ghulam Mustafa Khar.
In 2001, after some difficulty (the government, concerned about Pakistan’s image abroad, dragged its heels over issuing a passport), Tehmina Durrani helped Fakhra to move to Rome where, over the next 11 years, she underwent 39 major operations.
By the 38th operation, in 2011, she could move her mouth and one eye, and her face, though still badly disfigured, had regained some of its shape.
By this time, she had learned Italian and co-written a memoir, Il Volto Cancellato (The Erased Face), which brought in some income to add to a monthly disability allowance from the Italian government.
But the operations exacted a heavy psychological toll, and she was said to be depressed by the impossibility of returning to Pakistan, where friends were worried that her life would be in danger.
On March 17, Fakhra Younus climbed to the sixth-floor balcony of her apartment building in Rome and jumped.
In a suicide note, she gave her reason as “the silence of law on the atrocities and insensitivity of Pakistani rulers”.
News of her death arrived in Pakistan as the country was celebrating its first Oscar – awarded to the Karachi filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy for Saving Face, a documentary focusing on victims of acid attacks.
As Fakhra’s coffin arrived for burial, protesters were demanding that the case against Bilal Khar be reopened.
But Khar continued to deny that he bore any responsibility for his wife’s death: “My hands are clean,” he told interviewers. Fakhra Younus is survived by her son, who is in the care of an Italian family.

Fakhra Younus, Former Pakistani Dancing Girl Commits Suicide 12 Years After Acid Attack 

A former dancing girl who was left severely disfigured after acid was hurled into her face, has committed suicide 12 years after the attack.

Fakhra Younus, 33, felt she looked “not human” after the attack, which was allegedly carried out by her then-husband Bilal Khar.

Khar was accused of pouring the corrosive substance over her face as she slept, in full view of the victim’s five-year-old son.

Younus, then 21, was left fighting for her life and has endured 39 separate surgeries since the attack. She had left Khar earlier amid accusations of physical and verbal abuse.

Her nose was almost completely melted making it difficult for her to breathe.

Khar, the son of a former Pakistan governor, was acquitted, but many believe he used his connections to avoid justice, AP states.

Younus jumped from the sixth floor of a building where she was living and being treated in Rome on March 17, having finally decided life was no longer worth living.

Her body has since been returned to Pakistan, reigniting anger over her tragic case.

The former wife of Khar’s father, Tehmina Durrani, became a high profile supporter of Younus.

Durrani, who said Younus’s injuries were the worst she had ever seen on an acid attack victim, said: ”So many times we thought she would die in the night because her nose was melted and she couldn’t breathe.

“We used to put a straw in the little bit of her mouth that was left because the rest was all melted together.”

After Younus’s suicide, Durrani wrote a column in The News, stating: “Her life was a parched stretch of hard rock on which nothing bloomed.”

Durrani also wrote movingly about the "open disgust and contempt by everyone who set eyes on her in Pakistan" and gave heartfelt thanks to the Italian government for providing Younus with care.

News of Younus's death has been received with sadness around the world, with many calling for action over the 8,500 acid attacks reported in Pakistan in the last year.

PAKISTAN: Young women held in military torture cells and forced into sexual slavery

More Sharing Servijanuary 12, 2009

Ms. Zarina Marri, a 23-year-old schoolteacher from Balochistan province, was arrested inlate 2005, and has been held incommunicado in an army torture cell at Karachi, the capital of Sindh province. She has been repeatedly raped by the military officers and is being used as a sex slave, to induce arrested nationalist activists to sign state-concocted confessions.

One man, who was arrested by a state agency and kept in military torture cell almost for nine months, narrated the story of this young woman to Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières, RSF); nowpublic.com; the International Red Cross; and at Woolwich Court in London. The current whereabouts of the young woman are not known. It has been asserted that women who are fighting for the greater autonomy of Balochistan are being arrested by the state agencies and being forced into sex slavery intheir custody.

Mr. Munir Mengal, the managing director of a Balochi-language television channel, was arrested on April 4, 2006 from Karachi International airport by the state intelligence agencies and transferred to a military torture cell in Karachi for nine months (http://www.ahrchk.net/ua/mainfile.php/2006/1666/). He narrated the story of the forced sex slavery of the young teacher Zarina Marri whom he encountered in a military cell. According to the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Mr. Munir Mengal witnessed many human rights violations in this military prison. Mengal says that, "a young Balochi woman, Ms. Zarina Marri, was used as a sexual slave by the officers. They even once threw her naked into my cell. I did not know what had happened to this mother of a family who was arrested by the army in our province."

Another Balochi nationalist (name omitted by request), who was arrested by the militaryintelligence agency twice and kept in military cells in different cities, has confirmed to the AHRC that there were young Balochi females seen at those two torture cells, naked andin distress. The prominent Balochi nationalist leaders say that they know fact that young Balochi women are being arrested, either during or after protest demonstrations on the disappearances and are missing. They also know about the women are sexually abused in the military custody but they cannot say so publically because of their sanctity and harassment of their families.

Mr. Munir Mengal was also tortured and his penis was severely injured when he refused to have sex with Zarina Marri. He told RSF, "on 27th January, 2007 at 6 pm Major Iqrar Gul Niazi (Military Intelligence) called me in his office and showed me some nude pictures, and laughingly told me that you have been a director of a TV channel so certainly you have good relations with actresses."

When he returned to his cell he found porn pictures strewn all over it. Around 12 pm a low-ranking military officer called Subedar brought a female there. She was trembling and weeping. "He threw her on my body and told me, 'You know what to do with her. You are not a child we have to tell what to do with her.'" Mr. Mengal says after half an hour the officer returned, and seeing them sitting apart, abused them and forcibly took off their clothes. Mengal said he was stunned when the woman began praying in the Balochi language. She told Mengal her name was Zarina Marri and that she belongs to the Kohlu area, headquarters of the rebel Marri tribe, a scene of a bloody insurgency that begun in2005. She said she was a schoolteacher and that the army personnel had abducted her along with her one-year-old.

"They accuse us for spying for the Baluchistan Liberation Army," Zarina Marri said. She begged Mengal to kill her. “I have been undressed several times for them."

Mengal said on the refusal to have sex, the intelligence officials inflicted cuts on his private parts. "I thought I would lose my manhood," he said. Ms. Zarina told to Mengal that she has seen some females in the torture cell but was not allowed to talk with them.

At the time of this incident Colonel Raza of the Pakistani Army was in charge of that cell. After a few days he was transferred to Rawalpindi, Punjab province and Colonel Abdul Malik Kashmiri came as head of the military torture cell.

Mr. Munir Mengal was released from the military torture cell on 4th August 2007 and was held in a civilian jail on August 5th. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) representatives met him in Khuzadar jail, where he provided them with a detailed briefing which they wrote down. The next day their doctor also checked the injured portion of his penis. Mr. Andrew Barterlays, the officer of ICRC who visited Mr. Mengal several times injail, told Mr. Mengal that until he was out of custody the ICRC could not take up the issue of Zarina Marri, because both their lives would be threatened.

The Asian Human Rights Commission has already reported that 52 torture cells are run by the Pakistan army, please see following link (http://www.ahrchk.net/statements/mainfile.php/2008statements/1574/), Karachi was stated to have three military torture cells. The testimony by Mr. Munir Mengal has revealed the most heinous methods of army torture, using young women as sex slaves to induce political opponents to sign the government-concocted confessions of terrorist and anti-state activity.

The AHRC severely condemns the use of women as sex slaves by the Pakistan army and for keeping these women incommunicado. Pakistan is the signatory to Convention on the Elimination of All Forms Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) but women are being used as sex slaves in a gross violation of the Convention by army officers.

The AHRC urges the government of Pakistan to immediately hold a judicial investigationinto the women detainees being used as sex slaves by the army officers in their detention centers, and to arrest all the army officers posted in the torture cells; both inKarachi and in the rest of Pakistan. The perpetrators of these heinous crimes must be brought before the law. The government should ascertain the whereabouts of the women arrested from Balochistan province who have disappeared after their arrest, including Zarina Marri. It is the duty of the government to search for the missing persons taken by State intelligence agencies, who have held them in torture cells for many years.

Pakistan proudly calls itself the Islamic Democratic State but its rulers appear to lack the courage to bring its own military into check. It is a military that engages in torture and some of the most heinous methods of breaking the spirit of those that it considers the enemy, it is a military that pays no heed to the norms of civilised behaviour and is one that, if not brought to book will convert Pakistan into a barbaric state.