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A representative for the minority group claimed on Wednesday that 16 graves belonging to the Ahmadi community in Pakistan’s Punjab region were allegedly desecrated by religious extremists because the gravestones included Islamic emblems. Aamir Mahmood, a spokesman for Jamaat Ahmadiyya Punjab, claims that on August 22, unknown individuals desecrated 16 graves of Ahmadis in a walled communal cemetery in Chak 203 RB Manawala, Faisalabad district, around 150 miles from Lahore.
Numerous graves in the village cemetery have tombstones with Islamic verses engraved on them.
Mahmood told PTI that this cemetery is 75 years old and that there has never been a similar incidence before. He claimed that local Muslim clerics were inciting hatred towards Ahmadis, which led to religious extremists desecrating their graves.
“The bereaved families who are seeking to the government for justice are in great pain as a result of this crime. This behaviour is obviously against all human ideals and is not merely illegal “added he.
The graves of Ahmadi community members had previously been vandalised by religious fanatics in a number of similar occurrences in various regions of Pakistan. Mahmood reported that 185 Ahmadi graves had been vandalised just this year.
He added that “this ongoing persecution” demonstrates the complete disdain for the rights of the Ahmadi community and breeds profound uneasiness among the minority population. He pleaded with the administration to take decisive action to halt this assault and punish those responsible.
The Ahmadi community was proclaimed to be non-Muslim by Pakistan’s parliament in 1974. They were forbidden from claiming to be Muslims ten years later. They are forbidden from preaching and from making pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia.
Out of the 220 million people living in Pakistan, about 10 million are non-Muslims. The minorities in conservative Muslim-majority Pakistan sometimes complain of intimidation by the extremists.
