wfn.org | Pakistan church officials fear truth may never be known about massacre

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Note #7363 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

31-July-2002
02276

Pakistan church officials fear truth may never be known about massacre  
  
by Anto Akkara  
Ecumenical News International

NEW DELHI - Pakistan church officials say the deaths of four people arrested in connection with a church massacre last year means that the truth behind the massacre may now never be known.  

Police in Pakistan's Bahawalpur district said in a statement that the four were killed on Sunday when a police vehicle carrying the four came under attack.  

"When the assailants tried to escape after freeing those in custody, police opened fire," said Pakistan's Dawn newspaper, quoting the police statement. The shoot-out "continued for an hour" and resulted in the deaths of the four and two of the attackers.  

The four men had been arrested last week in connection with the attack last October by unidentified gunmen on a church in Bahawalpur in which 15 worshippers and a security guard died.  

They were being taken to a village 40 kilometers from Bahawalpur to retrieve the weapons used in the church attack when the police vehicle was ambushed, according to the police statement.  

"This means that it is now virtually impossible to know who were behind the dastardly killing at Bahawalpur," Church of Pakistan Bishop John Victor Mall of Multan diocese told ENI today.  

"They [the arrested] should not have been killed in this way. We wanted a full trial and investigation so that we could know who masterminded the shoot-out on our congregation," said Bishop Mall.  

Last October's attack was the worst single massacre of Christians in Pakistan's history and came shortly after the start of United States-led military action in neighboring Afghanistan.  

The massacre was widely believed to be the work of Islamic fundamentalists opposed to the US attacks on Afghanistan.   

Church officials said that many questions remained unanswered in the police report of Sunday's ambush.  

Peter Jacob, executive secretary of the National Commission for Justice and Peace of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Pakistan told ENI that it was "difficult to draw a definitive conclusion" about what really happened on the basis of the police account.  

There had been "no opportunity for the people to question or cross check" the official version of events, he said. 
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