Christian couple in Pakistan arrested over alleged blasphemy charges

A Christian couple in Pakistan was arrested on blasphemy charges on Sunday. The police took them into custody after "torn pages of Quran" were recovered from the rooftop of their house at Harbanspura in Lahore.

The couple, Shaukat Masih and Kiran Masih, were arrested after a local filed a complaint against them with the police. The complainant, identified as Mohammad Taimur, said that he was standing at a food shop when he saw some pages of the holy book.

"It appeared that the pages had been thrown from the roof of the house under which they were found. I knocked on the door, and a woman named Kiran Masih opened the door. I showed the torn pages of the Quran to her. She responded that her minor daughters -- Sundas and Rubi, and son Sabir -- might have thrown the pages. Taimur went to the rooftop of the house and found a pink colour bag with more pages of the Quran", read the FIR.

The police have registered a blasphemy case against the Christian couple under Section 295-B of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPP), according to a report in The Dawn.

Section 295 B makes desecration of a copy of the Quran punishable with imprisonment for life, while Section 295 C makes insulting the Prophet punishable with life imprisonment or the death penalty.

This is not the first such incident that has occurred in Pakistan. The country has often seen people resorting to violence to punish those accused of blasphemy.

The latest incident comes weeks after an angry mob set ablaze at least five churches in Pakistan's Punjab province after two people from the area were accused of committing blasphemy.

The mob went on a rampage after torn pages of the Quran were discovered in a Christian colony in Jaranwala tehsil, located in the Faisalabad district of Punjab.

The violence erupted after mosque announcements accused a Christian man and his sister of committing the act. The videos that have gone viral on social media showed people armed with batons and sticks attacking churches and setting the furniture and copies of the Bible on fire.

The mob also demolished the house of the man accused of blasphemy, according to local media reports. The houses of several other Christians living in the area were also set on fire. Many families ran away from their houses, seeking shelter with their relatives.

Pakistan has some of the harshest blasphemy laws in the world, which have attracted sharp criticism from rights groups. Minority communities, including Islamic sects, face frequent persecution in the Muslim-majority country, where the state religion is Islam.

In 2021, a 48-year-old Sri Lankan factory manager in Sialkot was beaten to death, and his body was set ablaze by a mob for alleged blasphemy. The mob had accused Priyantha Kumara of removing a poster bearing words from the Quran from the walls of the sports equipment factory where he used to work as a general manager.

The videos, which later made it to social media, showed Kumara being chased onto a roof, beaten with sticks, and stripped before being set ablaze by a bloodthirsty mob.

In 2017, an angry mob lynched university student Mashal Khan, who was found to have been falsely accused of blasphemy. In 2015, Muslims beat to death a Christian couple and burned their bodies in a brick kiln for allegedly desecrating the Quran.

A court in Pakistan sentenced two Christians and a Muslim to death for blasphemy in 2016. The three men were said to have made derogatory remarks against Prophet Muhammad in an audio recording. At least 84 people were accused of committing blasphemy in 2021, according to data provided by the Centre for Social Justice.