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September 19, 2007

Pakistan’s Christians fear they are terrorist targets

by Anto Akkara
Ecumenical News International

BANGALORE, India — The Justice and Peace Commission of the Roman Catholic Church in Pakistan has deplored a bomb blast at a church school in the troubled North West Frontier Province that damaged the school building and adjoining church.

“These incidents indicate that Christians are included in the targets of the terrorist groups,” the commission said in a statement following the Sept. 15 bomb blast at Bannu, one of the province’s main districts.

The commission said there had been no casualties but the buildings had been badly damaged.

It noted that a Catholic school in Sangota, also in the North West Frontier Province, has been closed since Sept. 9 following threats, reported in local newspapers, of suicide attacks.

Attacks in recent months against security forces in the region, which borders Afghanistan, have claimed hundreds of lives.

Many Christians have already fled the area following threats that if they did not convert to Islam they would be killed.

Peter Jacob, executive secretary of the Justice and Peace Commission, told Ecumenical News International on Sept. 18 that the Bannu bomb attack showed that the recent threats had to be taken seriously.

“It looks like the continuation of the threatening letters and anonymous phone calls the Christian community has received recently,” Jacob said.

Christian leaders in Charsadda and Mardan in the troubled province, as well as in Punjab and Peshawar, have received public threats from Muslim groups, “admonishing them to convert to Islam, shut their churches or else migrate from the area,” the Catholic commission stated.

More than 95 percent of Pakistan’s 165 million people are Muslims. Christians account for more than three million people.