_WORLD WATCH______________________________
____________________ Pakistan ________________

Christians massacred
Reprisal for US air strikes?
Sixteen people were killed when gunmen opened fire in a Catholic church in Pakistan on October 27. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but intelligence officials said members of a banned Islamic group were under suspicion. Christians in the overwhelmingly Muslim nation had expressed fears of retaliation ever since the US began air strikes against the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan.

Four gunmen armed with automatic weapons entered St. Dominic’s Church in Bahawalpur, in the Punjab province, at around 9 am on Sunday. The attack came while a local Protestant congregation was holding Sunday service inside the Catholic parish church. (The local Protestants do not have a building of their own, and the Catholic parish allows them to use theirs.) A few Catholic parishioners were just beginning to arrive for the Mass scheduled later in the morning when the gunmen arrived.

There were fewer than 100 people in the church at the time of the attack. Had the Catholics been gathered for Mass at the time, one eyewitness observed, the casualty figure would have been much higher, since the parish regularly brings together several hundred Catholics for Sunday. But the parish schedule had recently been changed—a fact that probably saved many lives.

After shooting and killing the (Muslim) policeman posted at the church gate, the killers “rained bullets on the people. Most of the dead have six to eight bullets in their bodies. Even the pastor who was leading the people has been killed,” said Catholic Bishop Andrew Francis of the Multan diocese who rushed to Bahawalpur immediately upon learning of the massacre inside a church in his diocese.

More than 3,000 people attended the funeral services for the massacre victims, and accompanied the funeral procession on a 2-mile walk to the local Christian cemetery. The entire town of Bahawalpur was shut down for the funeral, and Muslims joined Christians among the mourners.

Bishop Francis said that all Christians were devastated by the attack. “It does not matter whether they are Catholics or not; the target was Christians,” the bishop pointed out. “I feel totally broken, sad, and grieved. The altar is riddled with bullet marks. There is blood all over the church.”

When the US announced its plans to oust the Taliban regime, Christians in Pakistan began demanding security for churches and Christian institutions. (Christians, Hindus, and other religions make up only about three percent of the population in the overwhelmingly Muslim country.) The fear that Islamic fundamentalists would vent their ire on Christian targets if the US attacked Afghanistan had finally come true for the beleaguered Christian community in Pakistan despite the government’s decision to post security personnel around churches.

The pastor of the church, Father Rocco Patras, told the Fides news service that he had no doubt the killings were the work of Islamic extremists. “When a Muslim country is attacked by Western powers, we Christians in Pakistan suffer the consequences: murder, torture, suffering,” he said.

The assistant pastor, Father Jim Nuttal, is an American missionary. He told Fides that he had not received any sort of personal threat because of his American citizenry. But he added that “there are militant groups who are always looking for an excuse to incite protests and, with the American attacks in Afghanistan, they have found it.”

On October 27, three days after the massacre, the Pakistani government announced that 13 Muslim militants had been arrested and charged in connection with the killings. The government said that the investigation of the event was continuing, and more arrests could be expected.

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