Pop Star & Evangelical Muslim Cleric, Junaid Jamshed, on Board PIA flight

Junaid Jamshed, a Pakistani pop star turned evangelical Muslim cleric, was on board an aircraft that crashed into a mountainside on Wednesday, a airline official told Reuters. Jamshed rocketed to fame in Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s as the singer for the Vital Signs rock group, and later launched a solo career, with a […]

Twenty dead, more than 100 wounded, in Pakistan police academy attack

Gunmen stormed a Pakistani police training academy in the southwestern city of Quetta late on Monday night, killing at least 20 people and wounding more than 100, officials said. Some 200 trainees are stationed at the facility, officials said, and some had been taken hostage. Mir Sarfaraz Bugti, home minister of Baluchistan province, of which […]

How Tanveer Ahmed (and others) exploit religious sentiment to justify murder

A video from an influential Pakistani hate preacher glorifying the actions of Tanveer Ahmed will likely be subject to police investigation. In a five-minute video uploaded to YouTube, Khadim Hussain Rizvi, a Barelvi cleric, Pakistan’s largest grouping of Sunni Muslims, recounted Ahmed’s twisted account of the night he murdered Asad Shah. He confirmed that he […]

Suicide bomber kills at least 25 in Pakistani mosque

A suicide bomber shouted “Allahu akbar” and blew himself up in a packed mosque in northwestern Pakistan, killing at least 25 people and wounding 30 during Friday prayers, a local official said. A splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan Jamaat-ur-Ahrar (TTP-JA), claimed responsibility for the blast in Payee Khan, a village in Mohmand […]

Protests intensify in Indian Kashmir, security forces kill five

Indian security forces on Tuesday killed five protesters and injured 10 in clashes that erupted after crowds angered by the killing of a separatist militant in disputed Kashmir pelted them with stones and defied a curfew, officials said. Indian-ruled Kashmir has witnessed violent protests since July 8, when security forces killed a field commander of Pakistan-based […]

Pakistani ‘selfie’ cleric investigated over Qandeel Baloch’s murder

A prominent Muslim cleric in Pakistan who was censured for appearing in “selfie” photographs with murdered social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch is being investigated in connection with her killing, police said on Monday. Baloch, 26, described as Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian, divided opinion in the deeply conservative Muslim society with her risqué photos. Her murder on […]

Pakistan is at the Front Line of Tackling Extremism: Christians Mainly Targeted Today

The news of a suicide bomber killing over 65 people, mostly women and children in a park in Lahore, is more evidence of the fault-line that runs through Pakistan. The Pakistani Taliban have claimed the attack and we saw, first hand the impacts of extremism and sectarianism when attacks against other minorities have taken place […]

Relatives of Killer Tashfeen Malik Say That She Became Hardline in Saudi

Relatives of Tashfeen Malik, the woman involved in what has been classified as a terrorist attack in the United States, have said that she became more hardline after her time in Saudi Arabia. Her hardline views, according to them, were developed when she lived in the country. Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik died in a shoot-out after killing 14 people in San Bernardino in California. Within the last 48 hours, the terror group IS has claimed the couple as their followers though investigators have suggested that there were no external links to the couple and that the plot to kill had been concocted by the couple themselves.  Malik’s Pakistani relatives have suggested that her father cut off contact with his family in Pakistan due to a feud over inheritance and he moved to Saudi Arabia when his daughter was very young. Reuters has noted that school teacher, Hifza Bibi, the step-sister of Malik’s father who lives in the Punjab said: “From what we have heard, they lived differently, their mindset is different. We are from a land of Sufi saints and this is very shocking for us.” Time in Pakistan Ms Malik, 29, returned from Saudi Arabia to [...]

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Launch of the Connecting Communities, Pakistan Project

The Connecting Communities project is based on the ideas of enhancing, focussing and activating the power of communities who are of Pakistani heritage, and who are citizens and permanent residents of the United Kingdom. We are all aware of the enormous skills, energy possessed by diaspora communities of Pakistani heritage, the passion that many have […]

Interfaith Workshop in Gujranwala – Pakistan

On Sunday, the 6th of January, 2013, Faith Matters organized its third interfaith training workshop as part of their Project Musawaat (Equality) which aims to promote freedom of religion and belief in Pakistan and is focussed on working with Christian and Muslim communities in the Punjab region. 75 participants from 18 grass-roots level youth based […]