Blasphemy Case
| “ | In order to understand this case, one really has to look at how the affairs of The Frontier Post were being handled by its management. It's a paper that's been in active decline for the past seven to eight years, steadily it's lost all its good journalists... and basically the problem arose because none of the newspaper monitoring bodies... was bothered enough to look into the affairs of that paper, and to talk to its management about how they were handling it. So if a newspaper employee is drug addicted, such a mistake is quite likely to happen. | ” |
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—Ahmed Ahmer Khan, The Herald |
On January 29 2001, the Post ran afoul of federal blasphemy laws when it printed a Letter to the editor titled "Why Muslims Hate Jews", sent by eMail seemingly from an American Jew named Ben Z'Dec, that was harshly critical of Islam. Five employees were charged; the paper responded by filing action with the police against two of its employees it believed had deliberately inserted the letter without approval, hoping to harm the media outlet. Vandals later attacked the Post's offices in retaliation for the perceived offence, and set the printing press on fire.
Ultimately charges were only upheld against four men, Munawwar Mohsin who had been directly responsible for printing the letter in the paper, news editor Aftab Ahmad and Computers Chief Wajeehul Hassan, and General Editor Mahmood Shah Afridi. Mohsin was convicted, Ahmad and Hassan were acquitted, and Afridi absconded.
The trial revealed that the Post had hired Mohsin only days before he printed the letter, unaware that he was a drug addict who had fled from the local mental hospital, since they were hardpressed to find English-speaking people willing to help coordinate the publication of their paper. He was convicted of the blasphemy charges and sentenced to life imprisonment, but found to be "mentally ill".
According to The Globe, the paper was ultimately "not guilty of blasphemy...it was guilty of inefficiency".
In June 2001, similar charges were laid against the Urdu-language paper Mohasib.
Read more about this topic: The Frontier Post
Famous quotes containing the words blasphemy and/or case:
“All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.”
—Bible: New Testament Matthew 12:31.
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