In July 2008, a Muslim mob stormed a Protestant church during a prayer service on the outskirts of Pakistan's largest city,

Karachi, denouncing the Christians as "infidels" and injuring several, including a pastor. Witnesses said an angry Muslim mob raided the United Presbyterian Church in the suburb of Noorknan last week, July 10, carrying "swords, daggers and batons" and slogans that included "Infidels!" and "Stop false rituals." Up to "18 Muslims of the radical Gul Hassan Berohi group entered in to the Church and attacked and desecrated the church" and destroyed a Bible and other Christian books placed on the altar, said advocacy group Compassion Asia in a statement obtained by BosNewsLife. The Gul Hassan Berohi group had no comment. They allegedly said that the worshippers were "infidels" who "can not stay" in Pakistan as this "is the country of Muslims." The believers were reportedly told to recant Christianity and become Muslims or be ready to die."

In June 2009, International Christian Concern reported the rape and killing of a Christian man in Pakistan, for refusing to convert to Islam. A young Christian man was raped and brutally murdered in Pakistan for refusing to convert to Islam, and police are doing nothing about it, the victim's brother and minister told FOXNews.com. Pakistani police reportedly found the body of Tariq "Litto" Mashi Ghauri a 28-year-old university student in Sargodha, Pakistan lying dead in a canal outside a rural village in Punjab Province on May 15. He had been raped and stabbed at least five times. In March 2011, Shahbaz Bhatti was killed by gunmen after he spoke out against Pakistan's blasphemy laws. The U.K. increased financial aid to the country, sparking criticism of British foreign secretary William Hague. Cardinal Keith OBrien stated, "To increase aid to the Pakistan government when religious freedom is not upheld and those who speak up for religious freedom are gunned down is tantamount to an anti-Christian foreign policy." At least 20 people, including police officials, were wounded as 500 Muslim demonstrators attacked the Christian community in Gujranwala city on April 29, 2011, Minorities Concern of Pakistan has learnt. During a press conference in Karachi, the largest city of Pakistan, on May 30, 2011, Maulana Abdul Rauf Farooqi and other clerics of Jamiat-Ulema-e-Islam quoted immoral Biblical stories and demanded to ban the Bible. Maulana Farooqi said, Our lawyers are preparing to ask the court to ban the book. On September 23, 2012, a rampaging mob of protesters in Mardan, angry at the anti Islamic film Innocence of Muslims, reportedly "set on fire the church, St Paul's high school, a library, a computer laboratory and houses of four clergymen, including Bishop Peter Majeed." and went on to rough up Zeeshan Chand, the pastor's son. On October 12, 2012, Ryan Stanton, a Christian boy of 16 went into hiding after being accused of blasphemy and after his home was ransacked by an Islamist mob. Stanton stated that he had been framed because he had rebuffed pressures to convert to Islam.

The West sighed in relief when Rimsha Masih, the 14-year-old Christian girl arrested in Pakistan on August 16 for allegedly burning pages of the Quran, was finally released. Yet the West remains clueless concerning the graphic abusesincluding rape and murderChristian children in Pakistan routinely suffer, simply for being Christian. Consider two stories alone, both of which occurred at the same time Rimsha's blasphemy ordeal was making headlines around the world. On August 14, another Christian girl, 12-year-old Muqadas Kainat (which means "Holy Universe") was ambushed in a field near her home in Sahawil by five Muslim men who "gang raped and murdered" her. At the time, her father was at a hospital visiting her sick mother. He and other family members began a frantic search, until a tip led them to the field where his daughter's body lay. The

postmortem revealed that she had been "gang raped and later strangled to death by five men." Police, as usual, did not arrest anyone. As a Salem News report puts it, "Complicating matters is the fact that several Christian girls in this remote area have been raped and forced to both marry into the Muslim community and abandon their own religion, human rights groups report. there is a history in this part of Pakistan according to the Christian community, of local authorities failing to investigate cases of rape or other violence against Christians, often for fear of influential Muslims or militants." Similarly, on August 20, an 11-year-old Christian boy, Samuel Yaqoob, went to the markets of Faisalabad to buy food for his family, never to return. According to Wilson Chowdhry, Chairman of the British Pakistani Christian Association, "After extensive searching his body was found near a drain in the Christian colony, bearing marks of horrific torture, with the murder weapon nearby. His nose, lips and belly had been sliced off, and his family could hardly recognize him because the body was so badly burnt. Some 23 wounds by a sharp weapon have been identified in the autopsy. When sending his body for an autopsy, police raised the possibility of sodomy. Parts of Pakistani culture have a strong homosexual pederast culture, and Christian and other minority boys are especially susceptible to rape and abuse because of the powerlessness of their community and their despised status. In one case fairly recently, a Christian boy was kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed by a police officer, his body similarly being dumped in a drain." These were just some of the stories concerning the sexual abuse and murder of Pakistan's Christian children that occurred last Augusteven as the world stood in awe at the Rimsha Masih blasphemy case. Here are 10 more examples, chosen at random from the many former documented cases: Nisha, a 9-year-old Christian girl was abducted by Muslims, gang-raped, murdered by repeated blows to her head, and then dumped into a canal (May, 2009). Gulfam, another 9-year-old Christian girl, was raped by a Muslim man. Though not killed, she was left "in shock and in the throes of a physical and psychological trauma." During her ordeal, her rapist told her "not to worry because he had done the same service to other young Christian girls" (December, 2010). Lubna, a 12-year-old Christian girl was kidnapped, gang-raped, and murdered by a group of Muslims (October, 2010). Kidnapped last Christmas Eve, a 12-year-old Christian girl known as "Anna" was gang raped for eight months, forcibly converted and then "married" to her Muslim attacker. After she escaped, instead of seeing justice done, "the Christian family is in hiding from the rapists and the police" (October, 2011). After gang-raping a 13-year-old Christian girl, a band of Muslims came to her house when all male members were away working and "mercilessly" beat her pregnant aunt causing her to lose female twins to miscarriage: "They murdered our children, they raped our daughter. We have nothing left with us," lamented an older family member. The police went on to accuse the 13-year-old raped girl of "committing adultery with three men" (June, 2012). A Muslim man murdered a teenage Christian girl, Amariah, during an attempted rape: he had "grabbed the girl and, under the threat of a gun, tried to drag her away. The young woman resisted, trying to escape the clutches of her attacker, when the man opened fire and killed her instantly, and later tried to conceal the corpse" (December, 2011). Muslims abducted a 14-year-old Christian girl, Mehek, at gunpoint in broad daylight from her parents' house. One of her abductors declared he would "purify her" by making her "Muslim and my mistress" (August, 2011). Shazia, a 12-year-old Christian girl, was enslaved, raped, and murdered by Chaudhry Naeem, a rich Muslim lawyer, who was acquitted. His wife and son had participated in abusing the child (November, 2010). Nadia, a Christian girl who was abducted in 2001 when she was 15-years-old and forced to marry a Muslim, only recently returned to her Catholic family (January, 2012). A powerful Muslim businessman had two Christian sisters kidnapped, forced to convert to Islam, and "married" to him (May, 2011).

In every one of these cases, Pakistani police either failed to act or sided with the rapists and murderers. The anecdotes represent a mere sampling of the documented atrocities committed against the children of Pakistan's Christians, who amount for a miniscule 1.5% of the nation's population. Then there are the stories that never make it to any mediastories of silent abuse that only the nameless, faceless victims know. For example, it took five years for the story of a 2-year-old toddler who was savagely raped because her Christian father refused to convert to Islam to surface. After undergoing five surgeries, her anatomy remains disfigured and she suffers from several permanent complications. Her family lives in fear and hiding. How many Christian children in Pakistan are being mauled in silence, with their stories never surfacing? And what animates this savagery? Discussing the aforementioned rape of 9-year-old Gulfam, local sources in Pakistan put it well: "It is shameful. Such incidents occur frequently. Christian girls are considered goods to be damaged at leisure. Abusing them is a right. According to the [Muslim] community's mentality it is not even a crime. Muslims regard them as spoils of war." Indeed, here is how the late Majid Khadduri, "internationally recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on Islamic law and jurisprudence," explained the idea of human "spoils" in his War and Peace in the Law of Islam: The term spoil (ghanima) is applied specifically to property acquired by force from non-Muslims. It includes, however, not only property (movable and immovable) but also persons, whether in the capacity of asra (prisoners of war) or sabi (women and children). If the slave were a woman, the master was permitted to have sexual connection with her as a concubine. From here, one can begin to understand the rabid fanaticism that possessed Pakistan's Muslims concerning the Rifsha blasphemy case, which resulted in mass riots, Muslim threats to take the law in their own hands, and the dislocation of Christians, some of whom have been forced to live and worship in the wilderness: if infidel Christians, especially their children, are seen as mere "spoils" to be used and disposed of with impunity, certainly it must be intolerable for Muslims if one of these "sub-humans" dares to desecrate Islam's holy bookthe same book that ordains their inhuman status. And herein is the true significance of the Rifsha Masih case: success can be measured not in the fact that this one particular Christian child got away from the savageries of Islamic law and culture, but whether her ordeal will begin to open Western eyes to the terrors Pakistan's Christian children routinely face. The report goes on to provide key recommendations urging the Pakistan government to, firstly, repeal the blasphemy law a subject that has been at the centre of controversy, especially since the case of Christian blasphemy convict Aasia Bibi. According to the institute, Aasia continues to languish in an isolation cell and has expressed sadness over the violent death of Taseer and Bhatti her most vocal supporters. The institute says the reports findings confirm the legislature, executive and judiciary have historically played a role in creating a rift in the identity of the state, which is defined by whether a person is Muslim or non-Muslim. The neglect of minority issues, it further states, has created increased physical insecurity among minorities apart from increased social vulnerability such as lack of access to education, jobs and health care. Inconsistent state protection, successive constitutional amendments and implementation of controversial legislation such as the blasphemy laws provide minimal protection and have added to their social exclusion and vulnerability, the report says.

The most prominent of such incidents occurred on May 28, 2010, when armed gunmen attacked two Ahmadi places of worship in Lahore, killing over 88 people. According to the report, there has still been no official investigation in to the attacks. Despite this, all the people we spoke to at Rabwa keep an optimistic outlook and reiterate their commitment to Pakistan with their motto Love for all, hatred for none, the report states. Hair-raising incidents of persecution against Christians have come into the limelight, but any legal action or official condemnation is yet to take place. On July 31, 2009, a mob attacked Christian homes in Gojra, Punjab, setting fire to 60 houses and killing eight Christians. According to the report, victims families recently withdrew their case against 150 alleged perpetrators of the attacks. On June 7, 2011, all accused were released on bail and criminal cases were closed by an anti-terrorist court in Faisalabad for want of evidence and continuous absence of complainants and eye-witnesses. The report states that according to the director of Lahore-based NGO Community Development Initiative Asif Aqeel, the most serious cases of persecution faced by Christians today are seen in Punjab. According to Baanh Beli, a NGO based in Tharparkar, 80% of the Hindus living in interior Sindh are agriculture labourers and victims of caste and wider religious discrimination, the report states. The remaining 20% are from higher castes, but they face a different set of problems, such as security issues due to an increase in kidnappings for ransom. Lakki Chand Garji, 82, considered to be one of Pakistans most revered Hindu spiritual leaders, was kidnapped in Balochistan by a gang of armed men on December 21, 2010, and is yet to be traced and rescued, the report states. It is evident that the security and status of Hindus in Pakistan is influenced at a certain level by what happens across the border in India, the report further states. In the report, Hindu residents in Karachi recounted how their homes and temples were attached by angry Muslim mobs. It was almost as if the Hindu community in Pakistan was seen as an extension of the Indian state, it states. Although migration by Pakistani Hindus is on the rise, the report states that everyone they interviewed did not want to leave the country, even if they felt they needed to. One Hindu resident of Nagarpakar who had spent one year as a missing person accused of being an Indian agent, court-martialled and finally released as it was that the charges against him were fabricated, when asked if he would migrate to India told us, I am committed to this land. My heart says leave Sindh for hind, but I cant, the report states. The report concludes by urging the government to bring policy reform with reference to challenges faced by religious minorities in Pakistan. Waqqas, Christian Farzana and Pervez Masih, residents of Akhtar colony in Karachi told us about their sixteen-year-old son Waqqas. He was abducted, raped, tortured and murdered by a local police constable in January 2011. Waqqas is not the only Christian victim of his kind. The family is convinced that Christian young men like their son are easy targets for this type of crime. The police rarely take investigations against crimes against minority communities seriously and often no legal action is taken against the perpetrators.

Roop Chand Bheel, Hindu Roop Chand Bheel, 22, a labourer, was burnt alive by his Muslim landlord, Mir Abdul Rehman Talpur in Mirpur Khas. He was accused of stealing cotton and was detained by the landlord. His uncle said, First he was buried in the ground up to the waist and gashed on different parts of the torso with a sharp-edged object. Then he was pulled out, and an attempt was made to burn him to death. Chand was taken to Karachi for treatment, but died after three days. His family lodged an FIR at the Kot Ghulam Mohammad police station. Although, the other men involved in the crime were arrested, the landlord remains at large.

In March 2013, Muslims attacked a Christian neighborhood in Lahore, where more than 100 houses were burned after a Christian was alleged to have made blasphemous remarks.