KARACHI: A mob of Islamists beat to death a member of Pakistan’s minority Ahmadi community on Friday while demonstrating near an Ahmadi place of worship in Karachi, a member of the community said. Police said they were investigating the killing.
The victim, identified as Laeeq Cheema, died before he could receive medical treatment at a hospital in the southern port city, said Amir Mahmood, a spokesman for the Ahmadi community. Government Civil Hospital spokesperson Summaiya Tariq confirmed the death of Cheema, saying he had multiple injuries.
Mahmood blamed the attack on a mob of people from the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, or TLP, a radical Islamist party, and said they had rallied outside the Ahmadi place of worship and tried to damage it.
"One member of the community was killed after the mob identified him as an Ahmadi. They attacked him with sticks and bricks," Muhammad Safdar, a senior local police official in the port city of Karachi where the incident happened.
"The mob included members of several religious parties," he told AFP.
Safdar said police took around 25 Ahmadis into custody for their safety.
An AFP journalist at the scene saw a prison van escorted by police vehicles take the Ahmadi men away, after negotiating with the 600-strong chanting mob.
The Ahmadiyya community are considered heretics by the Pakistani government and have been persecuted for decades, but threats and intimidation have intensified in recent years.
A local resident among the crowd Abdul Qadir Ashrafi told AFP he joined the mob to pressure police to arrest the Ahmadis.
"We requested that the place be sealed and that those conducting the Friday prayers be arrested, with criminal proceedings initiated against them," Abdul Qadir Ashrafi, a 52-year-old businessman said.
Senior Karachi police official Asad Raza told local media outlets that they had deployed additional police to avoid any unrest in the city ahead of the TLP rally. He said Cheema was killed away from the Ahmadi worship site, and that police were still trying to confirm who attacked him.
Karachi police rescued community members from the worship site after it was surrounded by demonstrators, Mahmood said, but he also complained that police have been slow to take action against TLP protests nationwide.
Video footage that Mahmood shared with The Associated Press showed crowds chanting anti-Ahmadi slogans outside the worship site. He said TLP supporters had been holding such protests every Friday and that police had not taken any action in previous weeks.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said it was "appalled by the orchestrated attack by a far-right religious party on a colonial-era Ahmadi place of worship".
"This failure of law and order is a stark reminder of the continued complicity of the state in the systematic persecution of a beleaguered community," it said on X.
Deadly mob violence
Ahmadis, who number around 10 million worldwide, consider themselves Muslims, and their faith is identical to mainstream Islam in almost every way, but their belief in another messiah has marked them blasphemous non-believers.
Pakistan's constitution has branded them non-Muslims since 1974, and a 1984 law forbids them from claiming their faith as Islamic.
Unlike in other countries, they cannot refer to their places of worship as mosques, make the call to prayer, or travel on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
Hardline TLP supporters regularly monitor Ahmadi places of worship and file police complaints against them for identifying as Muslims and conducting prayers in a manner similar to Islamic practices -- illegal in Pakistan.
According to a tally kept by the community, six Ahmadis were killed in 2024, and more than 280 since 1984.
In the same period, more than 4,100 Ahmadis have faced criminal charges including 335 under blasphemy laws which carry the death penalty.
Mob violence is common in Pakistan, where blasphemy is an incendiary issue that carries the death penalty.
Dozens of churches were ransacked in the city of Jaranwala in 2023 when clerics used mosque loudspeakers to claim that a Christian man had committed blasphemy, sparking a crowd of hundreds of Muslim rioters.
Last August, the Supreme Court was pressured into backtracking on a landmark ruling that would have allowed Ahmadis to practice their faith as long as they do not use Muslim terms, after weeks of protests by fundamentalist groups including death threats to the chief justice.