Bangladesh on Thursday exonerated two Christians along with
four Muslim friends accused of “hurting religious sensibility.”
Nurul
Islam, another Christian and their Muslim friends were cleared of the
charge after police failed to provide documentation of any evidence
against them, an attorney said.
In March, Christians under
the direction of the Way of Peace movement had arranged a two-day health
camp offering free treatment to poor villagers in Damurhuda area in
Chuadanga district, some 210 kilometers (126 miles) northwest of Dhaka.
Around
100 villagers attended the camp for free treatment the first day, March
23, and a Japanese doctor treated them. But two of the Christian
organizers and their Muslim friends were arrested on March 24 under
Section 54 of the penal code, a special power granted to police to
arrest anyone on any suspicion.
They were released on bail
three days later. Police are required to submit a primary investigation
report within 15 days of the beginning of prosecution, and when they
failed to do so, the Christians were released at a hearing on April 10.
Police again filed a case on April 13, however, charging them with
“hurting religious feelings” of area Muslims after a foreign doctor
offered Bibles to patients at a health camp.
The Japanese
volunteer doctor offered Christian leaflets and Bibles to the patients,
telling them they were under no obligation to take the literature,
Christian said. The foreign doctor was not named in either of the cases.
Lawyer Aksijul Islam Ratan told Compass that police had
harassed his clients from the beginning, saying officers rather than any
known victim filed the case as plaintiff.
“It was a very
complicated case, as neither any individual nor any group filed the
case,” Ratan said. “But the accusations from the government side against
the Christians were baseless, so the honorable court exonerated them.”
The
Christians were accused of distributing leaflets to convert poor
Muslims, thus allegedly hurting the religious feelings of those in the
area, said Ratan.
“The police harassed them from the very
beginning, and what the police did was excessive,” he said. “Again
police could not show relevant documents regarding their charge. So the
honorable court did not take the charge into cognizance and discharged
my clients.”
Islam told Compass that justice was done in the face of police hostility against him and the others.
“We got proper justice twice from the court,” he said.
The
Bangladeshi constitution provides for freedom to propagate one’s
religion subject to law, but authorities and communities often object to
efforts to convert people from Islam, according to the U.S. Department
of State’s 2010 International Religious Freedom Report.
Bangladesh is the world’s third-largest Muslim-majority nation, with
Muslims making up 89 percent of its population of 164.4 million,
according to Operation World. Christians are less than 1 percent of the total, and Hindus 9 percent.
The Pew Research Centre’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, a private
U.S. research group, said government restrictions and public hostility
involving religion grew in some of the most populous countries from
mid-2006 to mid-2009. Besides Pakistan, the countries most restrictive
or hostile towards certain religions included India, Indonesia, Egypt,
Iran, China, Myanmar, Russia,Turkey, Vietnam, Nigeria and Bangladesh –
although most of these did not show much change in the three years,
according to the Pew report.
