(International Christian Response) When 16-year-old Ryan Stanton and his father returned to their home in the middle-class area of Gulshan-i-Iqbal, Karachi, the night of Oct. 8, they were stunned to see the local mosque leader and about a dozen other furious Muslims waiting for them.
"We saw about 10-15 locals led by Khursheed Alam, the main complainant in the case, and Pesh Imam Qari Ghulam Qadir, prayer leader of the colony's mosque, standing at our door – they were visibly angry," said the latest Christian youth in Pakistan to be charged with blasphemy. "They told my father that some people in the residential-cum-office compound of SSGC [Sui Southern Gas Company] had received a blasphemous text message from my phone number. Their tone was very aggressive, and it seemed they were fully poised to kill me."
Ryan said the men showed his father a text message allegedly sent from Ryan’s phone to the cell phone number of one of his neighbors.
His father, Bryan Patrus, told Morning Star News that the imam's threats became increasingly harsh as the group built up pressure on the boy to admit to sending the text message.