Antonio Socci
Libero

November 9, 2014
Shahzad Masih was 28 years old and his wife, Shama, 25, two young Catholics with four children.  She was pregnant with the fifth.  She was working in a job in a brick making factory known for exploiting its workers, whose owner, a Muslim, had already brutally beat her.  She worked in Kasur, near Lahore, in that Pakistan where Christians are considered as trash.  Last November 4th the two young people were falsely accused of having profaned pages of the Koran.  They were tortured for two days, lynched by a furious mob and at the end thrown into an oven and burned.  These slaughters are not rare.  It is a continual horror that Christians undergo at the hands of a people and a State that daily humiliates them and threatens them with death by means of the notorious blasphemy laws.  Pakistan is not a small country. It has the atomic bomb and has 180 million inhabitants, making it the sixth most populous nation in the world and the second most populous among Muslim nations after Indonesia.  The fiery ordeal underwent by these two Christians in such a savage way was reported even in our own newspapers.  But there was no action taken, neither by individuals, nor associations, nor institutions.