LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistani police stepped up their search Monday for the suspect in the killing of a doctor from the country’s tiny Ahmadi minority, the latest in a string of deadly attacks targeting the community.
The physician was gunned down at a private hospital where he worked in the eastern city of Sargodha on Friday; the gunman fled the scene.
The Ahmadi religion is an offshoot of Islam but Pakistan declared Ahmadis non-Muslims in 1974. There are about 500,000 Ahmadis in Pakistan, a nation of 250 million.
No one claimed responsibility for Friday’s killing but supporters of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, a radical Islamist party, have carried out many of the attacks on Ahmadis, accusing them of blasphemy.
Blasphemy carries the death penalty in Pakistan and even just rumors or allegations of insulting Islam can incite mobs to deadly violence.
Sargodha police official, Sikandar Ali, said the motive behind the killing of Dr. Sheikh Mahmood remains unclear. An investigation is ongoing, he said.
Mahmood’s killing was the third attack on Ahmadis in Pakistan in since April, said Amir Mahmood, a spokesman for the Ahmadi community. He urged the government to protect Ahmadis, whose places of worship and even graveyards are also often desecrated by extremist Sunni groups.
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