Pak court orders teenage Christian girl forcibly converted, to be handed to parents

A court here on Wednesday ordered that a teenage Pakistani Christian girl, who was abducted and forcibly converted to Islam after marrying off to a Muslim man in February, be handed over to her parents. Shalat Masih, 14, was produced by police in the Lahore High Court and said that she was abducted from her native town Faisalabad and later sold to a Muslim man.

The girl's father told the court that some members of the Christian community of his locality had abducted his daughter and later sold her off to a Muslim man named Zafar Iqbal. "After forcibly converting her to Islam, Iqbal married the underage girl. She was later taken to the Jamia Rizvia Mazhar-i-Islam Faisalabad on February 20 and was renamed Ayesha," he was quoted as saying by the Dawn.

During the hearing, Justice Tariq Saleem Shaikh ordered handing over the girl to her parents. In a similar case last month, two Hindu sisters --Reena, Raveena, were allegedly kidnapped by a group of "influential" men from their home in Ghotki district in Sindh on the eve of Holi.

Soon after the kidnapping, a video went viral in which a cleric was purportedly shown soleminising the Nikah (marriage) of the two girls, triggering a nationwide outrage. On an average 25 Hindu girls are reportedly converted to Islam and forcibly married to Muslim men in a month in Sindh.

(With inputs from agencies.)