Iqbal Masih, a house painter in Lahore, Punjab Province, said his 32-year-old Muslim neighbour, Azeem Ullah, took his 16-year-old daughter from their house in the early hours of 30 April. Masih registered an abduction case against Ullah the same day, but police released him after some hours.
“I don’t know how Azeem Ullah fooled my innocent child into going with him,” Masih said.
On 16 May, Jessica appeared before Judicial Magistrate Hassan Sarfraz Cheema in Lahore and recorded her statement, in which she claimed that she had converted to Islam and married Ullah of her free will. The judge then gave her into the custody of her kidnapper, though it was evident her claims were forced.
“My daughter Jessica Iqbal couldn’t recite the Kalima (Islamic conversion proclamation) or respond to any other question about Islam in the courtroom,” Iqbal Masih told sources.
“My wife and I begged Jessica to reconsider her statement, but she told us that she was helpless,” Masih said. “She was clearly under immense pressure to speak in her abductor’s favour because she repeatedly said that she was fearful for our lives.”
Sohail Habil is supporting the Masih family’s legal struggle and has petitioned the sessions court to challenge the judge’s order.
Many kidnapped girls in Pakistan are forced to convert to Islam and raped under cover of Islamic “marriages” and pressured to record false statements in favour of the kidnappers, rights advocates say. Judges routinely ignore documentary evidence related to the children’s ages, handing them back to kidnappers as their ‘legal wives’.
Amid a proliferation of such cases, Pakistan’s parliament on 19 May passed a significant bill aiming to curb, discourage and eventually eradicate child marriages in the federal capital territory by raising the legal age of marriage for both sexes to 18 years, and prescribing stern punishment for violators.
Nationally, the Christian Marriage (Amendment) Act 2024 set the marriageable age at 18 only for Christians; if they convert to Islam, girls considered Muslims come under Sharia (Islamic law), which allows them to marry younger.
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