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KARACHI: Pakistani police rescued a missing Christian teenager who was allegedly forced to convert to Islam and marry a 44-year-old Muslim, her family said Tuesday after the case sparked street protests and outrage on social media.
A Karachi city court ordered the police to release the 13-year-old and arrest the man three weeks after his disappearance, following calls by Christian and women’s rights organizations for the authorities to act.
Police took the girl to a women’s shelter in Karachi, where she will remain until a court hearing on Thursday, said Jibran Nasir, her parents’ lawyer. The man, a neighbor of the family, was due to appear in court on Wednesday.
Nasir said he hoped the girl’s school and government records were sufficient evidence to prove her age and “for the court to determine that she was a minor.”
The Sindh High Court initially accepted the girl’s statements that she was 18, the legal age for marriage in the province, and that she had voluntarily converted to Islam and married, sparking protests in Karachi by Christian groups and rights activists.
“My husband went to the police and reported her missing … but they did nothing,” said the girl’s mother, Rita Raja, at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Karachi, where the family has been seeking refuge since her disappearance. on October 13.
“Two days later, the police put a marriage certificate in my husband’s hand stating that he had gotten married,” Raja told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the cathedral, the headquarters of the Church of Pakistan.
Last week, a video of Raja crying and pleading to see her daughter outside the home of the detainee went viral on social media.
Activists say that the forced conversion and marriage of girls and women of minority religions, including Hindus and Christians, is a growing problem in Muslim-majority Pakistan, with those from poor and low-caste families a major target.
Last year, the alleged abduction and forced conversion of two Hindu sisters made headlines in Pakistan when a video of their marriages was widely shared on social media.
According to the campaign group Girls Not Brides, 21% of girls in Pakistan are married before their 18th birthday. It has the sixth highest number of married girls in the world at nearly two million, data from the United Nations agency for children, UNICEF, shows.
