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Pakistan church officials fear truth may never be known about massacre
2002-186-5
7/30/2002
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[Episcopal News Service]
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 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 in July 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. '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 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.
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