{"id":23586,"date":"2021-01-08T11:35:01","date_gmt":"2021-01-08T11:35:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/?p=23586"},"modified":"2021-01-08T11:35:01","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T11:35:01","slug":"pakistan-court-sentences-three-to-death-for-blasphemy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/2021\/01\/08\/pakistan-court-sentences-three-to-death-for-blasphemy\/","title":{"rendered":"Pakistan court sentences three to death for blasphemy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An anti-terrorism court in Pakistan has handed death sentences to three people for social media posts deemed insulting to Prophet Muhammad under the country\u2019s blasphemy laws.<\/p>\n<p>A fourth accused, a college teacher, was sentenced to 10 years in jail for a \u201cblasphemous\u201d lecture he had delivered in the classroom, court official Istifamul Haq told DPA news agency on Friday.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Judge Raja Jawad announced the decision in the capital Islamabad on the charges filed in 2017, Haq said.<\/p>\n<p>The convicted people can appeal in two higher courts to overturn their conviction or ask for mercy from the president.<\/p>\n<p>Pakistan\u2019s blasphemy laws, a colonial legacy made more stringent by former military ruler Ziaul Haq in the 1980s, envisage death as the maximum punishment for insulting the Prophet.<\/p>\n<p>Rights activists say laws have been used against the followers of other religions and minority Muslim faiths such as Shia and Ahmadiya in the Sunni-majority country.<\/p>\n<div id=\"aljazeera_incontent_dynamic1\" class=\"fs-dynamic\" data-slot=\"complete\" data-google-query-id=\"CJu9uvSejO4CFY-paAodxKIGEQ\">\n<div id=\"google_ads_iframe_\/15184186\/aljazeera_incontent_dynamic_0__container__\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" id=\"google_ads_iframe_\/15184186\/aljazeera_incontent_dynamic_0\" title=\"3rd party ad content\" src=\"https:\/\/a51cdcabc2670f2067fd1312336cfffc.safeframe.googlesyndication.com\/safeframe\/1-0-37\/html\/container.html\" name=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"250\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" sandbox=\"allow-forms allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation\" data-is-safeframe=\"true\" data-google-container-id=\"3\" data-load-complete=\"true\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p data-inc=\"1\">Since the 1980s, nearly 80 people have been killed by individuals or angry mobs even before their trials were concluded in courts.<\/p>\n<p>Between 2011 and 2015, the latest period for which consolidated data is available, there were more than 1,296 blasphemy cases filed in Pakistan.<\/p>\n<p>The laws are now treated as sacred, but experts say there is no clear definition of \u201cblasphemy\u201d in Islamic jurisprudence, nor is there agreement on the punishment for it.<\/p>\n<p>There has been a renewed focus on the laws after the United States urged Pakistan to revisit them following the murder of a Pakistani-American man inside a courtroom during his trial for blasphemy last July.<\/p>\n<p>Pakistan has dozens of convicts on death row or serving life imprisonment for committing blasphemy, according to the US Commission for International Religious Freedom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An anti-terrorism court in Pakistan has handed death sentences to three people for social media posts deemed insulting to Prophet Muhammad under the country&rsquo;s blasphemy laws. A fourth accused, a college teacher, was sentenced to 10 years in jail for a &ldquo;blasphemous&rdquo; lecture he had delivered in the classroom, court official Istifamul Haq told DPA news agency on Friday. &nbsp; Judge Raja Jawad announced the decision in the capital Islamabad on the charges filed in 2017, Haq said. The convicted people can appeal in two higher courts to overturn their<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":23587,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23586"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23588,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23586\/revisions\/23588"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}