Chinese national arrested in Pakistan on blasphemy charges

Islamabad/Peshawar: Pakistani police have arrested a Chinese national working at a hydropower project in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province after local people accused him of blasphemy, police said.

Police said that the Chinese citizen, a manager working at the Dasu Hydropower Project, the biggest hydropower project in Pakistan, in the Upper Kohistan district of the province, allegedly made blasphemous remarks on Friday when the workers were going to perform the weekly prayer. He was apparently unhappy with the progress of work at the work site.

The local police arrested the Chinese national, identified as Tian, on Sunday and registered a first information report (FIR) against him at the Dasu police station, hours after hundreds of residents and labourers working on the dam project blocked a key highway and rallied, demanding his arrest.

Local police officer Naseeruddin confirmed that an FIR was registered under Section 295-C (use of derogatory remarks, etc. against the Prophet) in the Pakistan Penal Code at the complaint of two workers employed as drivers of the accused.

Under Pakistan's tough blasphemy laws, the offence carries the death penalty.

According to the officer, police swung into action after getting reports on Sunday night that a local mob tried to break into a Chinese camp near the project site.

The mob was controlled, but they assembled again on Monday and blocked the Karakoram Highway, which links Pakistan with China, in a protest that lasted for over six to seven hours, demanding the Chinese national's arrest.

The blocked highway was later reopened to traffic, and work resumed at the Dasu Dam after Tian's arrest.

Scores of Chinese and hundreds of Pakistanis are working on the project.

Blasphemy is a sensitive issue in Pakistan. On December 3, 2021, a Sri Lankan national working in a factory in Sialkot was lynched by a mob after workers accused him of blasphemy.

There was no immediate comment from the Chinese Embassy in Islamabad.

The hydropower project site was hit by a suicide bus blast in July 2021, in which 13 people, including nine Chinese nationals, were killed.

Nine Chinese nationals and two Frontier Corps soldiers were among those killed when the bus carrying Chinese engineers and workers to the site of the under-construction Dasu Dam exploded.

The Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS), in a report in January 2022, stated that as many as 89 citizens were killed in 1,415 accusations and cases of blasphemy in the country since independence.

The report said that from 1947 to 2021, 18 women and 71 men were extra-judicially killed over blasphemy accusations. The allegations were made against 107 women and 1,308 men.

A large number of Chinese nationals have been working in Pakistan on various projects being undertaken under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

China's Foreign Minister Qin Gang called on his Pakistani counterpart Bilawal Bhutto Zardari in January to assert that Beijing was concerned about the safety of its workers based in Pakistan and urged Bhutto to take strong security measures to protect them amid a spate of attacks on Chinese nationals in the country in recent months.