2024-03-08 16:54:28
A 22-year-old student was sentenced to death by a court in Pakistan while a 17-year-old was sent to jail for life on charges of blasphemy over WhatsApp messages, reported BBC.
The judges of the court in Pakistan’s Punjab Province said the 22-year-old was sentenced to death for preparing photos and videos which contained allegedly derogatory words about Prophet Muhammad and his wives.
The court said the student shared the blasphemous content “with the intention of outraging the religious feelings of Muslims”.
The teenager was sentenced to life imprisonment for sharing the material. Both denied the charges and their lawyers argued they had been “trapped in a false case”, as per the BBC report.
The complaint against the two was filed in 2022 by the cybercrime unit of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) in Lahore.
The complainant alleged that he received the videos and photos with blasphemous content from three different mobile phone numbers. The probe agency established that “obscene material” was sent to the complainant after examining his phone.
The father of the 22-year-old student told the BBC that he was filing an appeal in the Lahore High Court against the verdict on his son.
Blasphemy is punishable by death in Pakistan. Laws against blasphemy were first codified by India’s British rulers and expanded in the 1980s under Pakistan’s military government.
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