A Pakistani court has sentenced a woman to death on the charge of sending blasphemous texts and caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad via WhatsApp.
Aneeqa Ateeq, 26, was arrested in May 2020 after being denounced for sending materials deemed to be in violation of severe cybercrime and blasphemy laws, according to The Guardian.
The British publication reports, based on the indictment document, that Ateeq met the whistleblower, also Pakistani, in 2019, in an online game, when they started chatting on WhatsApp.
The man then accused her of sending caricatures of prophets, making remarks of holy personalities on the messaging app and using her Facebook profile to spread blasphemous material.
The document notes that she “deliberately and intentionally taints righteous holy personalities and insulted religious beliefs of Muslims.”
In her defense, Ateeq said she is a practicing Muslim and believes she was purposely drawn into a religious discussion so the whistleblower could gather evidence and seek revenge after a disagreement in the conversation.
Her arguments, however, were not enough to get her out of a hanging sentence, in addition to a 20-year prison sentence. His lawyer, Syeda Rashida Zainab, said he could not comment on the trial because the matter was too sensitive, according to the British newspaper.
An Islamic country, Pakistan has one of the toughest blasphemy laws in the world, and its courts often sentence the accused to death – in practice, however, executions end up not taking place, and the defendants spend their lives in prison, reports the Guardian. .
More than 80 people are in prison on blasphemy charges, with half facing life in prison or the death penalty, according to the United States’ International Commission on Religious Liberty.
The caricatures of Mohammed are prohibited by Islam and have already motivated attacks on the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo and on professor Samuel Paty, who had shown the images in his classroom in Paris.
While the attack on the newspaper left 12 dead in January 2015, Paty was beheaded by a young Chechen in March last year. Both cases generated national commotion.
Inside Pakistan, a Sri Lankan worker was lynched and burned by a mob after being accused of blasphemy in December last year.
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