Gunmen in southern Pakistan shot dead 50-year-old doctor from Pakistan’s Ahmadiyya Muslim minority at his clinic in the latest attack on one of the country’s most persecuted groups.
The assailants stormed Mubashar Ahmad Khosa’s clinic in the city of Mirpur Khas on Monday evening and opened fire on him before fleeing the spot on a motorbike.
Zafarullah Dharejo, a senior local police official, added that a third attacker kept watch outside.
Dharejo said, “The doctor got a text message half an hour before the murder asking him to come out of his clinic.”
Khosa, who was a well-known in the area, succumbed to his injuries on his way to hospital. His body was shifted to Rabwah (Faisalabad) for burial after post-mortem from Civil Hospital Mirpurkhas on Tuesday.
Every September, anti-Ahmadi groups hold conferences throughout the country on the anniversary of a 1974 Supreme Court judgement that ruled the group non-Muslims.
In 2008, another Ahmadi doctor was gunned down in a similar way in the same city. In July, an angry mob torched an Ahmadi neighbourhood in Gujranwala, killing a woman and two girls after a local Ahmadi boy was accused of blasphemy.
Jamaat Ahmadiyya Pakistan spokesman Salimuddin said:
“Hate material declaring Ahmadis liable to death is distributed during conferences held in the name of Khatme Nabuwwat every year in September throughout the country,”