Image by Joseph Jansen
CV NEWS FEED // A court in Pakistan has sentenced to death a Christian mother of four who allegedly violated the country’s blasphemy laws.
According to International Christian Concern, Judge Muhammad Afzal Majoka on September 18 sentenced Shagufta Kiran, 40, to death for “intending to outrage religious feelings” and “insulting the Prophet Muhammad.”
Kiran’s lawyer, Rana Abdul Hameed, said her attorneys plan to appeal the decision, stating, “We feel it’s a wrong judgment based on prejudice. The judge didn’t bother to look at the evidence or conduct a proper analysis.”
The charges came after Kiran, who was part of several WhatsApp group chats where she would “[discuss] and [defend]” her Christian faith, forwarded a message in September 2020 on WhatsApp that “[contained] content deemed blasphemous against Muhammad.”
A Muslim member of one of the group chats lodged a complaint claiming that Kiran disrespected the prophet through the forwarded message. Kiran was arrested on July 29, 2021, in Islamabad, where her family had fled and gone into hiding after Kiran knew that she was being charged with blasphemy, according to the Irish religious freedom organization Church in Chains.
Kiran’s husband, Rafique Masih, who was not present during the arrest, told Church in Chains that his two sons, who were 10 and 12 at the time, were arrested at that time too. The sons were later released.
Masih stated that Kiran forwarded the message without reading it, so she was unaware of its contents. “Shagufta knew nothing about the post, she was not even the author of the post in question,” Masih stated. Masih noted that the message had been forwarded many times by other people before his wife forwarded it.
Church in Chains described the effect Kiran’s imprisonment had on her husband and four children.
“Rafique worked as a building contractor but following Shagufta’s arrest he and the children were forced to flee due to threats and fear of violence and since then the family has moved multiple times,” the organization’s website states:
The constant displacement has severely disrupted the children’s education, with many academic documents lost or inaccessible. In 2023 Rafique said he had permission to visit his wife once a week but could only afford to visit about once a month.
As CatholicVote previously reported, a July report found that within the first half of 2024, at least 70 violent attacks against Christians occurred in Pakistan. “In the wake of the devastating Jaranwala attacks in August 2023, Pakistani Christians have continued to experience heightened levels of violent religious persecution throughout the past year,” CatholicVote reported. In May, a mob of over 400 lynched a Christian man in Pakistan over blasphemy accusations.
