CV NEWS FEED // A now-fifteen-year-old Christian girl from Pakistan is sharing the story of how she escaped abduction, forced conversion, and marriage at the hands of her Muslim employer.
When Nayab Gill was 13 years-old she worked selling cosmetic products at a shop owned by a Muslim man, Saddam Hayat, 30, who was married with four children. In May 2021, Hayat arrived at Gill’s family house to take her to work.
Sharing her story in an article this week by the Christian Post, Gill reported that Saddam had tried on two prior occasions to make advances on the young girl while she was at work. “I was afraid that if I told my family about Saddam’s advances, my father would stop me from going to work, and my family would lose the money that we needed so desperately,” she said.
Saddam took the young girl to an abandoned house, where he forced her at gunpoint to renounce Christianity, and sign a blank piece of paper—if she did not comply, he would kill her and her father.
Gill’s father formally accused Saddam of abduction three days after the girl was taken. After which, Gill recalled: “Saddam told me that I would be presented before a judge, and if I did not testify that I had converted to Islam and married him of my free will, my family and I would be killed on the court’s premises.”
Gill testified in Saddam’s favor and the court placed her in his custody.
For the next two years, the young girl was confined to a room in Saddam’s house, where she endured repeated assault and inhumane treatment. “I prayed every night, saying, ‘God please help me,’” she said.
Gill was finally able to escape in April 2023 during the last week of Ramadan. Saddam had fled after his wife “registered a case against him for threatening her,” Gill said. “Fearing arrest, Saddam and his brothers fled the house, but in the rush of things, they forgot to lock me up.”
Gill ran to the nearest market, where she met a Muslim woman who helped her contact her family. “I don’t have the words to express the joy I felt when I saw my father,” Gill recalled.
However, after Gill’s father filed a second petition in September 2023, the Supreme High Court dismissed the case as irrelevant since Gill had been returned to her family.
The Christian Post added that the “Supreme Court’s decision has left the door open for more sexual exploitation of underage Christian girls in Pakistan in the guise of religious conversion.”
