Shocking! Christian Couple Sentenced to Death for Sending 'Blasphemous' Texts Say They Were Forced to Confess

 

It has been revealed that a disabled Christian man and his wife sentenced to death in Pakistan for blasphemy were tortured into confessing.

 

Shafqat Emmanuel and Shagufta Kausar, from Gojra, east Pakistan, were found guilty of sending a text message which 'blasphemed' against the Prophet Mohammed to their local imam in 2013.

 

According to Dailymail, Mr Emmanuel, who is paralysed from the waist down, claims the only reason he confessed to the crime was because he could not stand watching his wife be tortured by police. 

'There is no man who can stand to see his wife being tortured by police, so to save my wife, I confessed,' Mr Emmanuel said in an appeal for bail lodged this week. 

 

The couple were arrested in July 2013 after their local imam, Maulvi Mohammed Hussain, claimed Mr Emmanuel had used his wife's phone to sent him a text insulting the Prophet Mohammed. 

 

The couple, who have four children, denies ever sending the text, saying the phone had been stolen from them months before the message was supposed to have been sent. 

“There was no evidence that the text messages came from a phone owned by the couple,' Farukh Saif, an official of World Vision in Progress giving legal aid to the couple, told Christians in Pakistan.

 

'In the first place they had lost the phone some months before July 2013 and secondly there was no SIM card in their names. 

 

'The only evidence police produced was a bill for a SIM card from a shop owner which is unheard of.'

 

Mr Emmanuel and Ms Kausar were initially sentenced to death for blasphemy, but as with nearly all such convictions, it is most likely they will spend the rest of their lives in jail.

 

Pakistan's blasphemy laws are notoriously harsh, and accusations of blasphemy against Islam is taken very seriously in the country.