ICC Note:
Ashiq Masih, the husband of blasphemy victim Asia Bibi, wrote an open letter to the president of Pakistan pleading for his wife’s release. In October, Asia Bibi’s blasphemy conviction and death sentence were confirmed by the Lahore High Court, leaving an appeal to Pakistan’s Supreme Court that final option to getting Asia released. Will this open letter to Pakistan’s president be a step in the right direction? Only time will tell.
11/21/2014 Pakistan (Christian Today) – The husband of Asia Bibi, Ashiq Masih, wrote an open letter to Pakistani President Mamnoon Hussain on Monday, pleading for his wife’s release.
Bibi, a Pakistani Christian, was convicted of blasphemy in 2010, and is currently on death row. Her conviction was recently upheld by Lahore’s high court.
“Since Asia was sentenced to death in November 2010 for drinking a glass of water from our village well, my family has lived in constant fear and under death threats,” Masih wrote in the letter, according to the Guardian.
“I live in hiding with my five children as near as possible to Asia. She needs us very much to help keep her alive, to bring her medicine and good food when she is sick.”
Muslim women in Bibi’s village were apparently offended when she drank from the same well as them, and accused her of insulting the Prophet Muhammad.
Bibi’s case garnered international attention after the 2011 assassinations of Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs, Shahbaz Bhatti, and Governor Salmaan Taseer.
Both Bhatti and Taseer were vocal opponents of Bibi’s death sentence, and were murdered two months apart.
Bibi and her husband maintain her innocence, and Masih revealed that the mayor of Paris, France is willing to take the family in if she is freed.
“We are Christians but we respect Islam,” he wrote. “We are now trying our best to present the final case to the Supreme Court before 4 December.
“But we are convinced that Asia will only be saved from being hanged if the venerable President Mammon Hussain grants her a pardon.
“No one should be killed for drinking a glass of water.”
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