Archive: Christian Couple Burned to Death Over Blasphemy Claim in Pakistan

From the TI archives — originally published November 2014, based on reporting from AFP and Dawn.

KOT RADHA KISHAN, Pakistan — An enraged mob beat a Christian couple to death and burned their bodies in the brick kiln where they worked, police said on November 4, 2014, after accusing them of desecrating a copy of the Quran.

The victims were Shama and Shehzad Masih, a married couple identified only by their first names. "Yesterday an incident of desecration of the Holy Quran took place in the area," a local police official, Bin-Yameen, told AFP, "and today the mob first beat the couple and later set their bodies on fire at a brick kiln." The town, some 60 kilometers southwest of Lahore, had been tense since the alleged desecration the day before.

The Masihs were among Pakistan's brick-kiln workers — a workforce the Bonded Labour Liberation Front Pakistan estimated at 4.5 million indentured laborers, working in harsh, debt-bound conditions.

Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif constituted a three-member committee to fast-track the investigation and ordered police to beef up security in Christian neighborhoods across the province.

The killing was the latest in a pattern of mob violence against minorities accused of blasphemy. Blasphemy is among the most sensitive issues in Pakistan, where even unproven allegations can prompt vigilante murder. At the time, Asia Bibi — a Christian woman — had been on death row since November 2010 after being convicted of making derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. Weeks earlier, an elderly British man with severe mental illness who had been sentenced to death for blasphemy was shot by a prison guard.

Over a decade later, Pakistan's blasphemy laws and the mob violence they enable remain among the world's most documented human-rights crises — and the names Shama and Shehzad Masih are still invoked every time a new case makes headlines.