The 15-year-old Pakistani girl, Saba Masih, was reportedly abducted by a 45-year-old Muslim neighbour her parents identified as Muhammad Yasir.
Christian Post reported that Yasir forcibly took Saba away in a rickshaw on the 20th of May last in an effort to forcibly convert the Roman Catholic girl to Isalm.
Saba’s father Nadeem said that his daughter was abducted from an area of Pakistan’s Punjab region called Medina Town. He alleged that the police refused to rescue his daughter despite her impoverished parents begging them to save her.
Nadeem told Morning Star News:
“The police are not cooperating with us. The investigating officer keeps telling us that Saba has converted to Islam and contracted marriage with Yasir, but he has not shown us any document as yet. We are pleading with police to at least recover the girl and arrange our meeting with her so that we can ascertain the facts ourselves, but he doesn’t listen to us.”
Morning Star News quoted human rights activist Lala Robin Daniel as saying that the police had told Saba’s parents to “wait for her statement of conversion and marriage claiming her Islamic Nikah [marriage contract] had been solemnized.”
Christian advocacy group Church In Chains reports that every year hundreds of Christian girls are abducted and forcibly converted to Islam in Pakistan. They say that Hindu girls are also increasingly being victimized in this way.
In 2020 12-year-old Farah Shaheen was abducted and later discovered shackled in the home of a 45 year man identified as her abductor
Church In Chains alleges that local police are “slow to register reports of abductions and perpetrators know that the likelihood of conviction is low.”
“Typically, a Christian or Hindu teenager from a poor family goes missing and after some time her distraught family is informed that she has voluntarily converted to Islam and married her alleged abductor.”
Conversion to Islam alledgely takes place when the words “There is no true god but God [Allah], and Muhammad is the Messenger of God” are uttered.
Christian rights watch body Open Doors UK ranks Pakistan as 87 out of 100 in terms of the country’s poor treatment of Christians. The organization’s 2022 ranking of the 50 most dangerous places to be a Christian lists Pakistan as number 8, while Afghanistan, North Korea, and Somalia occupy the top three spots respectively.
Open Door’s website states that, “In Pakistan, Christians are considered second-class citizens and are discriminated against in every aspect of public and private life. Believers who have converted from Islam are the most vulnerable to persecution”.
It also features the story of a girl called Arzoo who was reportedly kidnapped, married and converted to Islam at the age of 13. Two days later Arzoo’s abductor was granted custody of the girl by a court after producing a marriage certificate stating that the girl was 18 and had converted to Islam.
There are an estimated 4.1 million Christians living in the Islamic Republic which accounts for only 1.9% of the total population which is approximately 212 million.