DHAKA (UCAN): At least 1,000 Rohingya Muslims have crossed into Bangladesh from India since December to escape alleged harassment and imminent deportation, according to Bangladeshi officials.
 

ISLAMABAD (UCAN): “We condemn it in the strongest terms. If the victims were criminals, they should have been arrested. The law enforcement agencies should have taken the legal course of action,” Father Almas Silas of Sacred Heart Church in Sahiwal, Punjab province, Pakistan, said, reacting to the extrajudicial killing of four people by armed personnel of the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) on January 19. 
 

LAHORE (UCAN): More than 500 Muslim clerics gathered in Islamabad, Pakistan, for the Seerat-i-Rehmatul Aalameen Conference issued the seven-point Islamabad Declaration on January 6. The declaration, in part, condemned murders committed “on the pretext of religious belief,” which are acts against the teachings of Islam.
 
It also said that any Islamic sectarian group could not be declared as infidel. “Any Muslim or non-Muslim could not be declared as doomed to death extra-judicially,” the declaration stated.
 

LAHORE (UCAN): The Pakistan Catholic bishops’ National Commission for Justice, together with the Peace and Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, gathered with human rights and religious organisations from across the country in Lahore to launch the Peoples’ Commission for Minorities’ Rights (PCMR).
 
The commission, which also includes representatives from Sikh, Hindu and Muslim communities, aims to press for the protection of religious minorities in the country.
 

ISLAMABAD (Agencies): The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) condemned the submissive response of Pakistan’s government’s to protests by Islamist group Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) as well as its inability to preserve “the writ of the state” during protests that erupted after the acquittal of, Asia Bibi, a Catholic woman convicted of blasphemy, in a controversial blasphemy case. 
 

KARACHI (UCAN): Pakistan’s chief justice, Saqib Nisar, has announced he will take up the appeal of Asia Bibi, the Catholic mother of five who has been on death row since 2010 for blasphemy (Sunday Examiner, 28 November 2010).
 
He told her chief counsel, Saif ul Malook to prepare her appeal.
 
“Be ready, Saif ul Malook. I am going to fix your case soon and I myself will preside over the bench,” Nisar told Malook on April 21.
 

QUETTA (UCAN): The provincial government in Balochistan, southwest Pakistan, plans to issue churches in the region with weapons licenses and has donated millions of rupees to Bethel Memorial Methodist Church in Quetta to support victims and families of a suicide bombing that killed nine people on 17 December 2017.
 
“The Balochistan Home Department will issue weapon licenses in the name of the churches,” Samuel Pyara, chairperson of the Implementation Minority Rights Forum (IMRF), said.
 

ISLAMABAD (UCAN): Six Christian churches in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province have been allowed to reopen some two weeks after their forced closure over alleged security threats, minority representatives said.
 
The house churches are located in the city of Abbottabad, where Al Qaeda chief, Osama bin Laden, was found and killed in a raid by United States (US) Navy SEAL commandos in 2011.
 

ISLAMABAD (AsiaNews): Christmas celebrations went off without a hitch in Pakistan as people in the cities of Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar, Karachi and Quetta marked the birth of Jesus under military protection.
 
Following the December 17 attack on a Methodist church in Quetta, authorities beefed up security around all Christian places of worship to prevent other terrorist attacks and allow Christian celebrations to go ahead without any problems.
 

KARACHI (SE): To the background boom of a 19-gun salute, members of the Pakistan army, navy and air force formed an guard of honour for the body of Sister Ruth Pfau, who died on August 10, as it was carried into St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Karachi for a state funeral.
 
The flag of the Vatican City flew at half-mast high above the cathedral, alongside the Pakistani national flag. The requiem Mass was celebrated by Archbishop Joseph Coutts.