Federal agents in Pakistan last week arrested a Christian under a blasphemy law mandating the death penalty in relation to material that appeared on Facebook groups without his knowledge, sources said.
Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) officials took 24-year-old Arsalan Gill of Railway Quarters in Mughalpura, Lahore, into custody on March 17 as he returned home from his work as a sweeper, said his brother Suleman Gill.
The impoverished Catholic family was shocked when an FIA official told them late that night that their son was arrested and charged with sharing blasphemous content on Facebook groups. The FIA officials did not let them meet with him that night, Suleman Gill said.
“The next morning when we were finally able to meet him briefly, we asked him about the accusation,” Gill told Christian Daily International-Morning Star News. “He told us that some unknown persons had added him to two groups on Facebook without his knowledge, and he had no idea about the content that was shared on those pages.”
The FIA charged Arsalan Gill under multiple sections of Pakistan’s widely misused blasphemy law, including Section 295-C, which carries a mandatory death penalty, according to the First Information Report (FIR) the agency filed. He was also charged under Section 11 of the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act 2016, which prescribes imprisonment of up to seven years for preparing or disseminating information through any information system or device that promotes or is likely to promote interfaith, sectarian or racial hatred.
Rights advocates said it was quite likely that the impoverished Christian was targeted by a “blasphemy business group” that, according to the National Commission for Human Rights and the Special Branch of the Punjab Police, has entrapped hundreds of innocent persons, including Christians, in false cases of online blasphemy by using honey traps and pornographic websites.
“The modus operandi is the same in all cases registered by the anti-blasphemy unit of the FIA’s Cybercrime Wing,” said attorney Lazar Allah Rakha, who represents several people falsely charged with blasphemy. “This unit is colluding with Islamist lawyers and activists to trap innocent youths in false cases of blasphemy for extorting money and defending the blatant abuse of the blasphemy laws for other vested interests.”
Suleman Gill said their family did not have the financial resources to hire legal defense for his brother and appealed to Christian groups for support.
“My father works as daily wage laborer, while Arsalan and I worked as sweepers,” he said. “We live in a rented quarter and are barely able to meet the daily expenses of our family. In these circumstances, we currently have no idea as to how we will pursue the legal course of action for my brother’s release.”
The Islamabad High Court on Feb. 2 advised the Pakistan government to establish a four-member commission to investigate alleged collusion between the FIA and Islamist clerics that has ensnared more than 400 innocent people, including Christians, in a surge of false blasphemy cases in the last two years.
The commission should include a retired judge of the high court or the Supreme Court, a retired senior officer of the FIA, an enlightened and religious scholar who has known and has done works of public good, and a senior expert of information technology whose presence on the commission will greatly assist the commission members in what is a technologically complicated chain that the commission will have to understand, stated the order by Justice Ejaz Ishaq Khan.
The court directed the cabinet secretary to ensure that the summary is placed before the federal cabinet for consideration, and that the additional attorney general should submit the cabinet’s decision in court before the next hearing.
The order was issued in response to petitions filed by families of more than 100 people the FIA has charged with sharing blasphemous content online. The petitioners claimed that the “blasphemy business group” had fraudulently trapped their loved ones into sharing blasphemous content on social media platforms and urged establishment of the enquiry commission and assessment of the legitimacy of FIRs registered by the FIA.
In the hearing on Friday (March 21), Khan expressed dissatisfaction over the government’s response to the petitions, terming it slow and incomplete.
The matter, which affects hundreds of lives, has seen little progress since the initial directive was issued on Sept. 13, he noted.
The court highlighted the Interior Ministry’s failure to provide a definitive statement on whether an application for constituting an inquiry commission had been received or not. Similarly, the FIA had also not clearly stated whether the evidence in question had been fabricated or planted, he said.
The judge then ordered the live broadcast of proceedings of the case, saying that it has become a matter of significant public interest. He noted that the courtroom was filled beyond capacity with many more people gathered outside and directed IT officials to make immediate arrangements for online streaming of the proceedings.
Pakistan ranked eighth on Open Doors’ 2025 World Watch List of the most difficult places to be a Christian.
