In the dark hours before dawn on May 12, a mother’s world shattered in a dusty corner of Pakistan’s Punjab province. Her son, 35-year-old Kashif Masih, was dumped like garbage on a street — his bloodied body broken, battered, and barely breathing. By sunrise, he was gone. The hands that had plowed fields for years now bore the bruises of inhuman cruelty. Steel nails had been hammered into his legs — a punishment for a crime he didn’t commit, and a faith he was born into.
Kashif was a Christian laborer. His only ‘fault’ — working loyally for three years under a former police inspector, Malik Irfan, in Sialkot District. On the night of May 11, Irfan accused Kashif of stealing a mobile phone. Instead of seeking justice through the law, Irfan and his men became judges, jury, and executioners. They abducted him and tortured him through the night with iron rods and wooden clubs. When they were done, they threw his body onto the road — as if his life was worthless. He somehow made it home, his last words to his brother Riyasat painting a horrific picture: seven men, led by Irfan, beat him until he confessed to something he hadn’t done. “The bruises told the story even before he spoke,” Riyasat said, struggling to hold back tears. “They didn’t just beat him… they nailed him.”
The brutality against Kashif isn’t an isolated case — it is part of a chilling pattern. Christians in Pakistan, a vulnerable minority, are too often at the receiving end of such unthinkable violence. On February 27, 2025, another Christian man, Wasif George, was publicly humiliated — paraded on a donkey, his head shaved, his face blackened — because a few Muslim landowners accused him of stealing firewood. On June 6, 2024, 18-year-old Waqas Salamat was tortured to death with electric shocks by a factory owner for leaving his job. The common thread: all victims were Christian, and all attackers walked with privilege and impunity.
Despite Kashif’s murder being reported, justice remains an uphill battle. The police hesitated to register a case against a former officer. Only after a crowd of grieving Christians gathered, demanding accountability, did authorities finally act — Irfan was arrested, but two of his accomplices are already out on bail, and others remain at large. “What was my brother’s life worth to them?” Riyasat asks. “A phone? Or was it the cross he wore around his neck?”
The Masih family — seven brothers, two sisters, and a devastated mother — now grieves not just the loss of a loved one, but the loss of faith in a system that protects the powerful and persecutes the voiceless. In their sorrow, however, the Christian community has stood strong, offering support, raising funds, and pursuing justice. But in a country where hate still triumphs over humanity, how many more Kashifs must bleed before the world pays attention?
This is not just a story of one tortured man. It is the haunting echo of a nation’s silence — and a cry for justice that cannot be ignored.