Pakistani Muslim man sentenced to life in prison for raping 12-year-old Christian girl
A Pakistani court has sentenced a Muslim man to life in prison for raping a 12-year-old Christian girl.
A Muslim man named Reza, along with three accomplices, kidnapped a Christian girl, whose name is being withheld, in September 2023 and took her to an unknown location. The Christian girl was 12 years old at the time of her abduction. She was abused and raped by Reza and his accomplices for a month, and the defendants forced her to convert to Islam and then prepared a fake marriage certificate for her.
Police arrested Reza in October 2023, but the other accused remain at large. Hanif Hamid, the Christian family’s lawyer, said in a statement: “The judge has sentenced this man to life imprisonment and a fine for the crime of kidnapping and sexually assaulting this girl, who was 12 years and four months old at the time of the crime. The sentence was issued under sections 376 and 364 of the Pakistan Penal Code.”
Given that the family court ruled to annul the forced marriage and confirm the forced religious conversion of the girl, the judge did not pay any attention to these matters when sentencing Reza to life imprisonment. Hanif Hamid, the family's lawyer, also expressed concern about the disregard for the charges of forging the marriage certificate and forced religious conversion.
According to the Center for Social Justice, more than 400 cases of forced marriage and forced religious conversion were reported in Pakistan from 2021 to 2024, most of the victims being minor girls and children. The UN Human Rights Committee has also called on Pakistan to take urgent measures to protect religious and religious minorities from such crimes.
Pakistan is one of the countries where many extremist Muslims live and who harass, torture, and sexually rape Christians, and in many cases, they also marry them unofficially with fake documents and force them to convert to Islam. Violence that causes many mental and physical problems in the victims.
