Pakistani police search for the suspect in the killing of an Ahmadi minority doctor
LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistani police stepped up their search Monday for the suspect in the killing of a doctor from the country's tiny Ahmadi minority, the latest in a string of deadly attacks targeting the community.
The physician was gunned down at a private hospital where he worked in the eastern city of Sargodha on Friday; the gunman fled the scene.
The Ahmadi religion is an offshoot of Islam but Pakistan declared Ahmadis non-Muslims in 1974. There are about 500,000 Ahmadis in Pakistan, a nation of 250 million.
No one claimed responsibility for Friday's killing but supporters of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, a radical Islamist party, have carried out many of the attacks on Ahmadis, accusing them of blasphemy.
Blasphemy carries the death penalty in Pakistan and even just rumors or allegations of insulting Islam can incite mobs to deadly violence.
Sargodha police official, Sikandar Ali, said the motive behind the killing of Dr. Sheikh Mahmood remains unclear. An investigation is ongoing, he said.
Mahmood's killing was the third attack on Ahmadis in Pakistan in since April, said Amir Mahmood, a spokesman for the Ahmadi community. He urged the government to protect Ahmadis, whose places of worship and even graveyards are also often desecrated by extremist Sunni groups.
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Hamas's worldwide network and Al Jazeera 'Media Jihad' role in global media manipulation
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"Information reaches consciousness at the headline level, and sometimes not even that." To illustrate this point, she shared an example from her conversations with Muslims worldwide: "I asked if they knew who the Bibas family was. The answer was no; and the Bibas family was the most famous event regarding Israel in the world." She added that even regarding October 7 itself, there isn't sufficient information, compounded by the fact that Hamas and Al Jazeera have vehemently denied harming civilians, knowing such actions are perceived as illegitimate by Muslims and the international community. Shemer emphasized that Hamas's success in propagating this narrative stems from its appeal to human and Muslim emotions. However, she characterized this as manipulation, explaining that "Hamas's political and religious leadership doesn't focus at all on the human suffering in Gaza. 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"Public pressure is being created toward the regimes in these countries, when the public comes to them with complaints about how they normalized relations with Israel while Israel is portrayed as a criminal," she concluded, warning that a decade of diplomatic efforts to achieve the Abraham Accords could be lost. However, Shemer claimed that not everything is lost. She advocated for Israel to continue and expand aid distribution, noting that aid distribution areas are safe zones where Israel doesn't fight. She proposed creating a protected, separate compound supervised by international or Israeli authorities where the entire civilian population could relocate, providing food, medical care, and everything the population needs while ensuring positive images of Israel caring for the civilian population emerge. "Take care of the population and ensure that positive pictures come out of a civilian population that Israel cares for,' Shemer suggested. 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Associated Press
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Associated Press
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