Swedish Christian Worker Dies from Pakistan Shooting

Bible school teacher, 70, gunned down by suspected Islamic extremists in Lahore.
ICC Note:
Birgitta Almby, a Swedish Christian aid worker who was shot last week in Lahore, died from her wounds last night at a hospital in Sweden. She had served the Pakistani Christian community for 38 years.
12/13/2012 Pakistan (Morning Star News) – Birgitta Almby, Bible school teacher and director of a Christian-run technical training institute in Lahore, died last night in her native Sweden from wounds sustained in a Dec. 3 shooting here by suspected Islamic extremists. She was 70.
Shot by two armed men outside her house in Lahore’s upscale Model Town as she returned from her Full Gospel Assemblies (FGA) office in the Kot Lakhpat area, Almby died at about 10 p.m. Pakistan Standard Time at Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, FGA Bible School Principal Liaqat Qaiser told Morning Star News.
Almby, director at the FGA Technical Training Institute and also a teacher at the FGA Bible School, was shot in the chest, and the bullet damaged her left lung. Initially she was taken to Lahore’s Jinnah Hospital, where doctors removed the bullet and said her condition was critical because of excessive bleeding.
She had served the Pakistani Christian community for 38 years.
“Almby will be missed dearly,” Qaiser said. “She spent a long time serving the poor and downtrodden Christians in Pakistan, and every Christian is very sad at her demise. But she is in a much better place now.”
Police have yet to trace the assassins and unearth a motive for her murder, but Qaiser said he believes she was targeted by Islamic extremists.
“Who else would want to murder someone as apolitical and harmless as Almby, who had dedicated her life to serving humanity?” he said. “The police say they are trying hard to find the killers, but at the moment there is nothing substantial. We just hope her killers are brought to justice.”
Model Town Superintendent of Police Investigations Ijaz Shafi Dogar said his department was probing from all angles, but that nothing could be said of the motive for the killing, “as there are no witnesses.”
“We were hoping that Almby would recover from the coma and provide information about the men who targeted her, as she was the only person who had seen her assailants,” Shafi Dogar told Morning Star News. “There are no other witnesses.”
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