We’re seeing more COVID patients in ICU as case numbers rise. That affects the whole hospital

Deb Massey, Southern Cross UniversityRising COVID cases in several Australian states means demand for intensive care unit (ICU) beds and specialist critical nurses will rise.

This increase in demand is on top of the typical workload ICUs might see.

And because of the nature of COVID itself and other factors, this puts pressure on the entire hospital system.

---

Read more:
How are the most serious COVID-19 cases treated, and does the coronavirus cause lasting damage?

---

What happens in ICU?

The ICU is where we care for the most critically unwell patients, where treatments are designed to support breathing and circulatory problems affecting the heart, blood, or blood vessels.

The most unstable and sickest ICU patients require airway support in the form ventilation to help them breathe. They also need circulatory support in the form of drugs to improve blood pressure and heart function.

Patients come to ICU as a planned admission (for example, after a complex operation), or as an emergency admission (for example, after a serious car accident).

---

Read more:
ICU ventilators: what they are, how they work and why it’s hard to make more

---

Patients stay for, on average, three days in ICU before recovering enough to be moved to a ward, or sadly, dying.

Because patients in ICU are unstable and critically unwell, there is usually one nurse to care for each patient. This is a highly skilled job. Most ICU nurses have extra postgraduate qualifications.

COVID changed the type of patients we see

Patients who are critically ill with COVID are often sicker than other ICU patients and may require more support for their breathing and circulation. Often, they need to stay in ICU longer than other patients.

This creates challenges for hospital systems, because beds in ICU become blocked, and planned operations may be cancelled because of the lack of ICU beds.

Once patients with COVID no longer need ventilation or circulatory support, they are transferred to the ward for additional care. They may have experienced painful procedures and have a degree of physical impairment.

They may also have witnessed a number of stressful events in the ICU, such as emergency resuscitation procedures and deaths, which may increase the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression.

Although we don’t have definitive long-term data, patients who have been critically ill from COVID often have a long and difficult journey of recovery and will likely remain dependant on health care services for some time.

---

Read more:
Younger adults can get very sick and die from COVID too. Here’s what the data tell us

---

COVID changed how we nurse

ICU staff looking after COVID patients have the additional demands of working in full personal protection equipment (PPE), which can be hot and uncomfortable and very challenging to work in.

The need to use PPE correctly, and the constant concern about becoming infected or dying if there’s an infection breach, adds to nurses ongoing stress.

The International Council of Nurses’ latest analysis shows the number of nurses who have died after contracting COVID-19 globally is greater than 2,200 – more than any other health-care worker. This data are from earlier this year, so we expect those figures to have risen since then.

---

Read more:
Here’s the proof we need. Many more health workers than we ever thought are catching COVID-19 on the job

---

COVID challenges Australia

In Australia, there has been more time to respond to the challenges of COVID. In many states, the numbers of ventilators increased, models of care were developed for COVID-positive patients, and snap lockdowns ensured scarce ICU resources were not overwhelmed.

However, the increasing number of positive cases in New South Wales in particular, coupled with the highly infectious Delta variant, means ICUs risk reaching capacity.

At the time of writing, 109 patients were in Australian ICUs and 37 of these patients required ventilation.

Australia has 191 ICUs with 2,378 beds and the capacity to increase this by by up to 4,258 beds.
But there may not be enough specialised nurses or equipment match this bed increase.

Surge capacity also varies between ICU categories and jurisdictions, with tertiary hospitals reporting more capacity. So deteriorating patients may need to be air-lifted to major metropolitan or regional centres.

---

Read more:
Does anyone know what your wishes are if you’re sick and dying from coronavirus?

---

What can happen in the future?

Fortunately, public health measures have meant Australia has been spared the horrors of countries that were unable to successfully increase their ICU resources to meet demands, for example, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Yet, hospitals are still feeling the impact of a rise in critically unwell COVID patients in many ways, and will do so in the future.

Undergraduate student nursing placements, for example, have been delayed and many universities have moved their education online. So student nurses may struggle to achieve the clinical hours required to graduate. This may mean a shortfall of clinically competent and educated ICU nurses in the future.

The best we can do

So the next time you hear the latest number of COVID patients in ICU, think of what’s behind those numbers and what this means for the whole hospital system and its staff.

Protect them, yourself and others by sticking to the public health advice, including getting tested with the mildest of symptoms. Most importantly, get vaccinated. People fully vaccinated against COVID rarely end up in ICU.

Deb Massey, Associate Professor, Chair of Nursing, Faculty of Health, Southern Cross University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We’re seeing more casual COVID transmission. But is that because of the variant or better case tracking?

Catherine Bennett, Deakin UniversityVictoria’s lockdown is to be extended for another week to get on top of the growing number of community cases, which now stands at 60.

But questions remain about what’s behind some of these cases.
Victoria’s COVID-19 testing commander Jeroen Weimar said yesterday in about four or five cases, the virus was transmitted after only “fleeting contact”.

Today, we heard from Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton about one case suspected to have been infected when visiting a site some two hours after an infectious person had left. The source case had been there for some time, and it was described as a poorly ventilated space.

Nonetheless, this is consistent with the aerosol transmission we have become increasingly concerned about, and perhaps this is the first documentation of this outside hotel quarantine.

Today we also heard that health authorities have reported about 10% of cases are linked with more casual exposures, including at “tier two” sites (Victoria describes exposure sites according to risk, with a tier one site being the most risky).

So is it the virus, or more focused efforts in tracking cases, that’s led us to finding such casual exposures?

---

Read more:
What can you expect if you get a call from a COVID contact tracer?

---

Is it the virus?

Despite today’s news, people are not more likely now to get infected by brushing past someone on the street.

In the vast majority of cases, people have become infected by very close contacts, or at certain “tier one” exposure sites when there at the same time as a known case.

There is evidence the variant associated with India is more infectious. This particular lineage of the Indian variant B.1.617.1, however, may not be as infectious as other lineages.

It reinforces how important it is that outbreaks are contained as early as possible where this increased risk of spread is still manageable.

On average, with variants of concern like the one currently circulating in Victoria, a case might infect 15% of household contacts instead of 10% seen in 2020. When new case numbers are high later in an outbreak, this difference in transmission translates to much bigger jumps in case numbers.

The way the virus spreads in clusters has also not changed, with some cases not passing the virus on, while a small number pass it on to many.

If this strain of the virus were vastly more transmissible than the original strain, we’d expect to see many cases. This strain has been in our community for a month now, undetected and running free for more than two weeks. There would be many more than 60 cases if this were true.

---

Read more:
What’s the ‘Indian’ variant responsible for Victoria’s outbreak and how effective are vaccines against it?

---

We’re also better at tracking cases

The main thing that’s changed since Victoria’s second wave last year is that we have forensic analysis of every case and we’re better at finding casual links between cases.

We’re now publishing lists of venues with exposure times and more people are coming forward for testing than at the peak of Victoria’s second wave. We also have check-in data for many venues.

This results in more reliable measures of both the total spread and routes of virus transmission, than in the second wave, or any community outbreak of this size.

Transmission associated with more casual exposures would have been much more likely to be missed before. Even if these cases were picked up, they might have been counted among the “mystery cases” that comprised 18% of all cases in 2020. We didn’t know where these cases were infected as there were no apparent links between them and known cases.

We are doing much better this time with only three transmission events that not yet fully understood.

How about this ‘fleeting contact’?

The four or five cases Weimar mentioned yesterday relate to a range of indoor exposure sites including a display home, a Telstra shop, local grocery stores, and a shopping strip.

This is where people may have been in direct contact with a case, but where no definitive exposure event is documented, there is no check-in and people don’t know each other.

So from what we know so far, there’s been a crossover between when most cases were present and where their contacts became infected. And 90% of these are in the settings we know are high transmission risk — households and workplaces in particular, where there is extended and repeated indoor contact.

---

Read more:
Australia has all but abandoned the COVIDSafe app in favour of QR codes (so make sure you check in)

---

The more casual contacts described yesterday, in a display home or at the Telstra shop, there might have been some overlap with a case in a small enclosed area for sufficient time to receive an infecting dose.

A further example Sutton provided today was an infection that started with someone sitting in the same outdoor area as a case at a hotel bistro. We know there is less risk in outdoor settings generally, but on a still autumn day, we now know this is all it takes.

Now, as we have transmission in the beer garden, all those nearby will be recategorised as primary close contacts and asked to quarantine for a full 14 days, even if they have returned a negative test. Better to be safe than sorry.

That’s why it’s so important to check in with a QR code. You don’t always know the name of the person who’s standing (or sitting) next to you. It is also why check-ins will now be required at more retail and public venues across the state. Being able to identify contacts in these settings will remove some of the fear associate with this more casual spread.

So what are we to make of this?

This latest news reinforces the importance of QR codes and checking in. You never know who you’re standing next to in a long queue while shopping.
Extending our QR codes into further settings whether retail, grocery stores or display homes, which we now know are a risk, is a good move.

The message remains the same, get tested if you have symptoms or when directed to by public health officials, and isolate when necessary. In particular, keep an eye on those exposure sites, even if you only dropped in to grab a coffee.

But we shouldn’t be overly concerned about COVID-19 spread by “fleeting contact”. The precautions we all know (hygiene, distancing and masks) still work and are our best forms of protection.

Catherine Bennett, Chair in Epidemiology, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Catholic Church is investigating George Pell’s case. What does that mean?

Ian Waters, University of Divinity

Cardinal George Pell was this week sentenced by a Victorian court to six years’ jail for sexually abusing two choirboys, with a non-parole period of three years and eight months.

Although Pell was found guilty of the charges against him in December, he has remained a Cardinal in the Catholic Church. The Church previously said it would await the outcome of an appeal before taking action, but it has since confirmed that an investigation of Pell’s case will be conducted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

An American former cardinal was recently expelled from the priesthood by the Church following a canonical trial into claims of child sexual abuse. Here’s what it could look like if Pell was subject to a similar process.

---

Read more:
After Pell, the Catholic Church must undergo genuine reform

---

Canonical trials are governed by the rules of the Church

Most cases concerning the wrongdoing of Catholics are tried in secular courts. The decisions and punishments handed down by the courts are normally accepted by the Church as sufficient.

But the Church will conduct its own examination of cases where the church’s canon law requires punishment outside the competence of the courts of the land. That includes the excommunication of a member of the church, or the dismissal of a priest or bishop from the clerical state – often referred to as defrocking.

Tribunals to adjudicate matters that concern the Church’s own internal governance are principally governed by the rules and regulations of the Church, which are known as canon law (from the Greek etymology κανών or kanon, meaning a “rule”). These regulations are set out in the Church’s Code of Canon Law, which came into effect in 1983.

Since such trials are conducted because of the requirements of canon law, they are known as “canonical trials”.

---

Read more:
How an appeal could uphold or overturn George Pell’s conviction

---

Sexual abuse cases are handled by the Holy See

Catholic Church tribunals are normally held in the diocese of the parties to the case. The bishop of the diocese can judge cases for his diocese. But since bishops often have little or no in-depth knowledge of canon law, most cases in Catholic Church tribunals are handled by judges (clerics or laypersons) appointed by the bishop. The presiding judge is a priest known as the judicial vicar.

Some matters cannot be introduced at a diocesan tribunal, but are reserved for the various tribunals at the Holy See. This includes cases involving dioceses and bishops, and certain serious matters regarded as crimes in the Catholic Church. Examples of this would be matters of sacrilege (offences against the sacraments), and sexual offences by a cleric against a minor under the age of 18.

A college of judges try difficult cases

Usually a single judge presides over contentious and penal cases. But a college of three or five judges will normally try more complicated or difficult cases – especially if the prescribed penalty is an excommunication from the Church, the dismissal of a cleric, or if the case concerns the annulment of a marriage or an ordination.

Other officers of the tribunal include the promoter of justice, who is the prosecutor in penal cases. The tribunal also has notaries who swear in witnesses, and commit their testimony to writing.

Like any legal system, parties in a case have the right to appoint an advocate who can argue for them at the tribunal. If a person cannot afford an advocate, the tribunal can assign one to them free of charge.

---

Read more:
Triggering past trauma: how to take care of yourself if you’re affected by the Pell news

---

Defendants are presumed innocent

Catholic Church tribunals do not use the adversarial system used by the courts of the common law tradition. Rather, Catholic Church tribunals use the inquisitorial system law found in most European legal systems. That means the judges lead the investigation.

The standard of proof used by the Catholic Church tribunals is “moral certainty”. Certainty results from examination in good conscience of the available evidence. This isn’t the same as “absolute certainty”, but it’s more than mere probability. It is normally stricter than guilt “beyond reasonable doubt”, which is usually held to be the absence of doubt based on reason and common sense.

As a general rule, the defendant has the presumption of innocence, which means the defendant will win by default unless a majority of the judges is convinced with moral certainty of the petitioner’s case.

Ian Waters, Professor, Lecturer, Department of Moral Theology and Canon Law, University of Divinity

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jobs Minister Michaelia Cash resists call to give evidence in AWU court case

Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra

The government’s pursuit of Bill Shorten over a 2005 donation to GetUp has again come back to bite it, as Jobs Minister Michaelia Cash seeks to avoid a court appearance about last year’s police raids on Australian Workers Union offices.

Cash has been subpoenaed to appear in the AWU’s case against the Registered Organisations Commission (ROC) on August 1, as well as to produce documents earlier. But she told a news conference on Wednesday she had instructed lawyers to have the subpoena set aside.

Last year Cash wrote to the ROC about the A$100,000 donation to GetUp from the Australian Workers Union, made when Bill Shorten was union secretary. Shorten was one of the founding directors of the activist group.

The ROC commenced an investigation into whether the donation had been made with proper authority from the union.

Subsequently a member of Cash’s staff tipped off media that the Australian Federal Police were about to raid the AWU offices. Cash denied any knowledge of the alert given by her staffer, who quit over the incident.

The AWU launched court action claiming the warrants and the investigation were invalid.

This week Cash – who refused to say whether she has been interviewed by the AFP – declined on Tuesday evening and Wednesday to appear at the Senate hearings into the workplace portfolio, sending an assistant minister – even though she represents workplace minister Craig Laundy in the Senate.

Labor’s workplace relations spokesman Brendan O’Connor accused Cash of being in hiding.

“She should have taken responsibility for the conduct of her office seven months ago and resigned, which would have been consistent with the Westminster principles of ministerial responsibility,” O’Connor said.

Cash accused Labor and the unions of “a stunt”. “The subpoena was issued at the request of the Australian Workers Union – Bill Shorten’s former union. This is, in fact, the third subpoena at the AWU’s request,” she told news conference.

She said she was not a party to the court proceedings, which were between the AWU and the ROC.

It was Shorten who had questions to answer, Cash said, “Did he donate $100,000 of union members’ money to GetUp, of which he was a director at the time, without proper approval of the union’s executive?”

Cash said she would attend estimates “where I am the responsible minister” but in this case “Craig Laundy is the relevant minister”.

She had “issued instructions to the lawyers to have the subpoenas set aside”.

“This is a protection racket to protect Bill Shorten. Way back last year, if the AWU had produced the evidence that those donations were properly authorised, the matter would have ended there and then”.

The AWU has said the support for GetUp was approved by the union’s executive at the time.

In question time Malcolm Turnbull declared he had “complete confidence in the minister”.

He told parliament: “On the application of the union, the court has issued the subpoena. This is the third subpoena. One was substantially set aside; the other was completely set aside. Senator Cash is entitled to seek to set aside a subpoena if it’s judged not relevant.”

Turnbull said the “central issue was whether Shorten had paid the $100,000 to GetUp without authority, which would be very serious misconduct, “misappropriating other people’s money”.

He questioned why minutes of the relevant meeting hadn’t been produced. “No wonder people increasingly believe they cannot trust the Leader of the Opposition with other people’s money, let alone with the management of our economy”.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

A closer look at business cases raises questions about ‘priority’ national infrastructure projects

Glen Searle, University of Sydney and Crystal Legacy, University of Melbourne

Infrastructure Australia’s latest infrastructure priority list has been criticised for being “too Sydney-centric” and for giving Melbourne’s East West Link, cancelled in 2014, “high priority” status. The cancelled Roe 8 project in Perth was removed from the list.

So how does a project get onto Infrastructure Australia’s list? This requires submission of a full business case, which then needs to be “positively assessed” to be given priority status.

But our research, yet to be published, has found these business cases leave out highly significant costs. This article looks at three prominent projects – the WestConnex and East West Link motorways in Sydney and Melbourne respectively, and Cross River Rail in Brisbane – to illustrate how business cases submitted to Infrastructure Australia do not follow its requirements in key respects. This casts serious doubt on the business cases used to justify major motorway projects, as well as on how priority projects are selected.

---

Read more: FOI reform needed in Victoria amid East West Link fallout

Read more: Roe 8 fails the tests of responsible 21st-century infrastructure planning

---

What do business cases assess?

Ensuring business cases are completed before investment decisions are finalised is critical to “good planning”. Part of Infrastructure Australia’s remit is to head off concerns that projects are committed to before business cases are fully evaluated. This can help minimise “optimism bias” and ensure investments deliver community benefit.

---

Read more:
WestConnex audit offers another $17b lesson in how not to fund infrastructure

---

But we must also examine what the business case is actually showing us. The main part of each business case is the cost-benefit analysis. This compares the money value of project benefits and project costs. Economically viable projects should have a benefit-to-cost ratio above 1:1.

Infrastructure Australia requires project business cases to consider non-monetised benefits and costs, including community impacts. These benefits and costs are required to be quantified in some other way, or at least described. The basis used to estimate “external costs” must also be provided.

The cost-benefit methodology requires any significant positive or negative impacts on third parties – externalities – to be included. Examples include air quality, carbon emissions, noise, biodiversity and climate adaptation.

Social impacts to be covered include equity or the distribution of benefits (which Infrastructure Australia says need to be identified since cost-benefit analysis does not explicitly take these into account), and affected local communities and other individuals/groups. The non-monetised benefit and cost categories listed as relevant are: social impacts, cultural impacts, visual amenity/landscape, biodiversity and heritage impacts.

In support of monetary estimates, proponents must “describe and provide supporting material that demonstrates how land use, population and employment projections are modelled”.

The guidelines stress that the supporting conditions for expected land use impacts will be in place – for instance, necessary infrastructure investment where densification is assumed. Factors that can hinder the realisation of such benefits (such as local opposition to increasing density) must also be included.

This process would seem to produce a rational prioritisation of national infrastructure projects. The problem is that the business cases submitted to Infrastructure Australia do not follow its requirements.

High-priority projects with problematic business cases

To illustrate this, we analysed the business cases of three projects designated as “high priority” for Commonwealth funding:

• East West Link, to which the Commonwealth allocated A$1.5 billion before the new Victorian government cancelled the project

• WestConnex, which has been allocated A$3.5 billion

• Cross River Rail, which is yet to receive funding.

A key problem in these business cases is that significant project cost items have not been monetised. These include costs relating to environmental effects such as noise and visual amenity and to other impacts on businesses, households and property values.

For example, none of the three cases includes a valuation of the costs of lost business and disruption to household travel and amenity during construction. (This is a big issue with Sydney’s southeast light rail project.)

There is also no costing of the loss of property values along motorways, especially around exhaust emission vents. The East West Link and Cross River Rail business cases make some allowance for this by including the value of general changes in amenity from noise, urban landscape and visual amenity. None of these are costed in the WestConnex case.

Another significant omission relates to the costing of land use impacts. The WestConnex and East West Link business cases both forecast more, and longer, road trips across the network as a result of the projects.

The WestConnex scheme will increase vehicle kilometres by 600,000 per day and make outer suburbs more accessible relative to the inner city. The potential extra costs from greater sprawl are high, estimated at A$4.99 billion for Sydney over 25 years from 2011 if greenfield housing was 50% of new dwellings rather than 30%.

The opposite is the case for Cross River Rail. Increased higher-density development around rail stations would produce infrastructure savings, but the business case does not give these a value.

Furthermore, the valuation of changes in transport mode resulting from each project is inconsistent.

The Cross River Rail business case includes savings resulting from motorists switching from road to rail after the line is built.

The WestConnex project will have the reverse effect, with 45,000 public transport trips per day being switched to the motorway. But the business case does not put a value on the costs of this. These include bus and train revenue losses, or reduced service frequency and increased waiting time to reduce losses.

Debatable ‘wider economic benefits’

The most contentious business case component is wider economic benefits. These are productivity improvements arising from increased central city job density as a result of the projects improving access.

These benefits needed to be included to lift the East West Link benefit-cost ratio above one. But this is only achieved through sleight of hand – public transport improvements into central Melbourne are included as part of the full project cost. As the public transport component of the business case had low costs compared to its benefits, including these wider economic benefits was enough to push the overall ratio above 1.

Similar benefits are part of the WestConnex cost-benefit analysis. However, these benefits are to be achieved from extra car trips to the centre. This takes no account of the disincentives of road congestion and lack of parking.

Current central Sydney planning controls allow a maximum of one new parking space per 75 square metres of floor area for not-so-tall offices – or one space for about five new workers – and even fewer spaces relative to floor area for higher buildings. This means most increased job density will not come from people driving to work.

By contrast, the wider economic benefits of the Cross River Rail resulting from increased job density in central Brisbane are not valued for inclusion in the cost-benefit analysis.

---

Read more:
Brisbane’s Cross River Rail will feed the centre at the expense of people in the suburbs

---

Rethinking the business case

Our work points to several real concerns:

• a lack of consistency in what is included in business cases
• questions about how cases can be reasonably compared across projects
• discretionary inclusion or exclusion of critical items that bias results in favour of projects.

We need more holistic and integrated analysis of projects. This will take into account not only the “nation-building” aspects – the jobs and growth projects might inspire – but also the disrupting and displacing effects they produce across transport modes, land uses and people’s experiences of the city.

Glen Searle, Honorary Associate Professor in Planning, University of Queensland and, University of Sydney and Crystal Legacy, Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning, University of Melbourne

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Pakistan: Latest Persecution News

The link below is to the latest persecution news out of Pakistan concerning disabled 14-year-old girl, Rimsha Masih. The case has now taken an interesting twist.

For more visit:
http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2012/09/pakistan-blasphemy-case-rimsha-masih-granted-bail-imam-chishti-arrested.html

Latest Persecution News – 28 May 2012

Bhatti Murder Case in Pakistan Increasingly Murky

The following article reports on the latest news of persecution in Pakistan, where the investigation into the murder of Christian politician Shahbaz Bhatti has become mired in what may be a cover-up.

http://www.compassdirect.org/english/country/pakistan/article_1558131.html

 

The articles linked to above are by Compass Direct News and  relate to persecution of Christians around the world. Please keep in mind that the definition of ‘Christian’ used by Compass Direct News is inclusive of some that would not be included in a definition of Christian that I would use or would be used by other Reformed Christians. The articles do however present an indication of persecution being faced by Christians around the world.

Pakistani Christian Falsely Accused of ‘Blasphemy’ Illegally Detained

Policeman says Arif Masih, held at an undisclosed location, is innocent.

LAHORE, Pakistan, April 15 (CDN) — Police in Punjab Province, Pakistan have illegally detained a Christian on a “blasphemy” accusation, even though one officer said he was certain an area Muslim falsely accused 40-year-old Arif Masih because of a property dispute.

On April 5 Shahid Yousuf Bajwa, Masih’s next-door neighbor, initially filed a First Information Report (FIR) against “an unidentified person” for desecrating the Quran after finding threatening letters and pages with quranic verses on the street outside his home in Village 129 RB-Tibbi, Chak Jhumra, Faisalabad district. Desecrating the Quran under Section 295-B of Pakistan’s blasphemy statutes is punishable by up to 25 years in prison.

“Some identified person has desecrated the Holy Quran and has tried to incite sentiments of the Muslims,” Bajwa wrote in the FIR. Clearly stating that he did not know who had done it, he wrote, “It is my humble submission to the higher authorities that those found guilty must be given exemplary punishment.”

Bajwa charges in the FIR that when he went outside his home at 9 p.m. and found the pages, he looked at them by the light of his cell phone and thought they were pages of the Quran. Masih’s uncle, Amjad Chaudhry, told Compass the pages look like those of a school textbook containing quranic verses.

Chaudhry said Bajwa and his two brothers are policemen. After Bajwa found the pages and the threatening letters, Chaudhry said, he arranged for an announcement to be made from the loudspeaker of the area mosque.

“The message urged all the Muslims of the village to gather there due to the urgency and sensitivity of the matter,” Chaudhry said.

He said initially local Muslims were very angry and suggested that Christian homes be set ablaze, but that others said the Christians should be first given a chance to explain whether they were responsible.

“Then some Muslims began saying that because Arif Masih lived on this street, he would be the person who could have done this crime,” he said. “However, most of the people who gathered there said that they knew Arif Masih well and they could not imagine he could do such a vile thing. But others insisted that because Masih was the only Christian who lived on the street, only he could be suspected of the crime.”

At about 10 p.m. on April 5, Chaudhry said, Bajwa’s brother Abdullah Bajwa called Masih to the Siyanwala police station, where he was arrested; Masih’s family members were unaware that he had been arrested.

According to Section 61 of Pakistan’s Criminal Procedure Code, an arrested person must be produced within 24 hours before a court; Masih has been detained at an undisclosed location without a court appearance since April 5, with police failing to register his arrest in any legal document, making his detention illegal. Investigating Officer Qaisar Younus denied that Masih was in police custody, but Superintendent of the Police Abdul Qadir told Compass that Masih had been detained for his own safety.

Younus told Compass that he was sure Masih was innocent, but that he had been falsely accused because of a land dispute.

 

Property Conflict

According to Chaudhry, about two years ago Masih bought a plot next to his house that another villager, Liaquat Ali Bajwa (no relation to Shahid Yousuf Bajwa) wanted to buy – and who despised Masih for it, telling the previous owner, “How come a Christian can buy the plot that I wanted to buy?”

The parcel owner had given Masih preference as he knew him well, and he understood that the homeowner adjacent to the property had the first rights to it anyway.

At the same time, Ali Bajwa was able to seize about five square feet of the house of a Christian named Ghulam Masih after the wall of his home was destroyed in last year’s flooding. Feeling he was not in position to challenge Ali Bajwa, Ghulam Masih sold the land to Arif Masih so that he could take charge, Chaudhry said.

Arif Masih subsequently filed a civil suit against Ali Bajwa to evict him from his property. Chaudhry said Arif Masih was about to win that case, and that Ali Bajwa thought he could retain that property and obtain the one Arif Masih had purchased by accusing him of blasphemy with the help of police officer Shahid Yousuf Bajwa.

Ali Bajwa had been threatening Masih, saying, “You will not only give me this plot, but I will even take your house,” Chaudhry said.

Chaudhry said he had learned that Shahid Yousuf Bajwa felt badly after villagers criticized him for falsely accusing an innocent man of blasphemy, but that Bajwa feared that if he withdrew the case he himself would be open to blasphemy charges.

 

Neighbors

Arif Masih’s family has remained steadfast throughout the case, refusing to flee the area in spite of the possibility of Muslim villagers being incited to attack them, Chaudhry said.

“It all became possible because of Muslim villagers who sided with us,” he said.

Chaudhry said that when police arrived at the scene of the Muslims who had gathered with the pages and the threatening letters, the villagers told officers that they had not seen who threw them on the street. He said that the letters included the threat, “You Muslims have failed in doing any harm to us, and now I order you all to convert to Christianity or else I will shoot you all.”

The letters did not bear the name of the person who wrote them, he added.

On Monday (April 11), Chaudhry managed to meet with Masih, though Masih’s wife has yet to see him. Chaudhry told Compass that the first thing Masih asked him was whether everyone was safe, as there are only three Christian families in the area of about 150 Muslim homes.

“If the mob had decided to harm our houses, then it would have been very devastating,” Chaudhry said.

After Masih was arrested, at midnight police came to his house and began beating on the main gate, Chaudhry said. When Masih’s wife, Razia Bibi opened the door, the officers rushed into the house and searched it.

“They were looking for some proof, but thank God they could not find anything that could even be remotely linked with the incident,” he said.

Chaudhry added that police have not mistreated Masih, but he said the matter has lingered so long that he feared police may involve him in the case, or that “things may go wrong like in most blasphemy cases.”

Report from Compass Direct News
http://www.compassdirect.org

Judge Exonerates Jailed Evangelist in Bangladesh

Judge rules Christian did not ‘create chaos’ by distributing literature near Islamic event.

DHAKA, Bangladesh, March 31 (CDN) — A judge this week exonerated a Christian sentenced to one year in prison for selling and distributing Christian literature near a major Muslim gathering north of this capital city, his lawyer said.

After reviewing an appeal of the case of 25-year-old Biplob Marandi, the magistrate in Gazipur district court on Tuesday (March 29) cleared the tribal Christian of the charge against him and ordered him to be released, attorney Lensen Swapon Gomes told Compass. Marandi was selling Christian books and other literature when he was arrested near the massive Bishwa Ijtema (World Muslim Congregation) on the banks of the Turag River near Tongi town on Jan. 21.

On Feb. 28 he was sentenced for “creating chaos at a religious gathering” by selling and distributing the Christian literature.

“Some fundamentalist Muslims became very angry with him for selling the Christian books near a Muslim gathering,” Gomes said, “so they harassed him by handing over to the mobile court. His release proves that he was innocent and that he did not create any trouble at the Muslim gathering.”

The judge reviewing the appeal ruled that Marandi proved in court that he sells books, primarily Christian literature, for his livelihood.

“I am delirious with joy, and it is impossible to say how happy I am,” said his brother, the Rev. Sailence Marandi, a pastor at Church of Nazarene International in northern Bangladesh’s Thakurgaon district. “I also thank all those who have prayed for my brother to be released.”

After processing the paperwork for Marandi’s release from Gazipur district jail, authorities were expected to free him by the end of this week, according to his lawyer.

“My brother is an innocent man, and his unconditional release proved the victory of truth,” Pastor Marandi said. “I am even more delighted because my brother’s release proves that he was very innocent and polite.”

The pastor had said his brother did not get the opportunity to defend himself at his original trial.

Marandi’s attorney on appeal argued that his religious activities were protected by the religious freedom provisions of the country’s constitution. The Bangladeshi constitution provides the right for anyone to propagate their religion subject to law, but authorities and communities often objected to efforts to convert people from Islam, according to the U.S. Department of State’s 2010 International Religious Freedom report.

Every year several million male Muslims – women are not allowed – attend the Bishwa Ijtema event to pray and listen to Islamic scholars from around the world. Some 9,000 foreigners from 108 countries reportedly attended the event, though most of the worshippers are rural Bangladeshis. About 15,000 security personnel were deployed to maintain order.

Bangladeshi Muslims equate the annual event with the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. This year the Bangladesh event was held in two phases, Jan. 21-23 and Jan. 28-30.

At the same event in 2009, Muslim pilgrims beat and threatened to kill another Bible school student as he distributed Christian literature. A patrolling Rapid Action Battalion elite force rescued Rajen Murmo, then 20, a student at Believers’ Church Bible College, on Feb. 1, 2009.

Bangladesh is the world’s third-largest Muslim-majority nation, with Muslims making up 89 percent of its population of 164.4 million, according to Operation World. Christians are less than 1 percent of the total, and Hindus 9 percent.

Report from Compass Direct News
http://www.compassdirect.org

Two Christians Slain in Attack Outside Church in Pakistan

Muslim youths kill two, wound two others after dispute over teasing of Christian women.

KARACHI, Pakistan, March 22 (CDN) — Two Christians were gunned down and two others are in a serious condition with bullet wounds after Muslim youths attacked them outside a church building in Hyderabad last night, witnesses said.

Residents of Hurr Camp, a colony of working-class Christians in Hyderabad in Sindh Province, were reportedly celebrating the 30th anniversary of their Salvation Army church when a group of Muslim youths gathered outside the building and started playing music loudly on their cell phones. They also started teasing Christian women as they arrived for the celebration, according to reports.

Christians Younis Masih, 47, Siddique Masih, 45, Jameel Masih, 22, and a 20-year-old identified as Waseem came out of the church building to stop the Muslim youths from teasing the Christian women, telling them to respect the sanctity of the church. A verbal clash ensued, after which the Muslim youths left, only to return with handguns.

Witnesses told Compass by phone that the Muslim youths opened fire on the Christians, killing Younis Masih and Jameel Masih instantly, and seriously injuring Siddique Masih and Waseem. The injured men have been transferred to a hospital in Karachi, the provincial capital of Sindh.

Younis Masih is survived by his wife and four children, while Jameel Masih was married only a month ago, and his sudden death has put his family into a state of shock.

“My son had gone to the church to attend the anniversary celebrations from our family…a few hours later we were told about his death,” a wailing Surraya Bibi told Compass by telephone from Hyderabad. “I got him married only a month ago. The cold-blooded murderers have destroyed my family, but our most immediate concern is Jameel’s wife, who has gone completely silent since the news was broken to her.”

She said the local police’s indifference towards the brutal incident had exacerbated the Christians’ sorrow.

“The police were acting as if it was not a big deal,” she said. “They did not register a case until late at night, when all of us blocked the main Hyderabad Expressway along with the two dead bodies for some hours.”

Jameel Masih’s paternal uncle, Anwar Masih, told Compass that police were biased against the Christians, as “none of the accused has been arrested so far, and they are roaming the area without any fear.”

He said police had taken into custody some teenagers who had no involvement in the killings.

“This has been done just to show their senior officials that they are not sitting idle,” he said.

Anwar Masih said the families had little hope for justice, because “if we have to dishonor the dead bodies by placing them on the roads to get a case registered, what should we hope for when the investigations begin?”

He said that during their protest, some leaders of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, a regional political party known for its secular but often violent ideology, arrived and suggested the Christians retaliate against the Muslims.

“We told them that as Christians we are not going to take the law into our hands,” Anwar Masih said.

He said that Jameel Masih’s father, Sardar Masih, and the other Christians would visit the Baldia Colony police station Wednesday morning (March 23) to see whether there has been any progress in the investigation.

“Please pray for us,” he said.

Compass made efforts to contact Hyderabad District Police Officer Munir Ahmed Sheikh to ask about progress in the case and whether any of the named suspects have been arrested by police, but the calls were unanswered.

The killing of the two Christians comes a week after another Christian, sentenced to life imprisonment on false blasphemy charges, died in Karachi Central Prison. The family of Qamar David claims he was murdered on March 15, while conflicting reports from the jail suggest that he died of heart failure.

If David died from torture, yesterday’s killings bring the number of Christians murdered in March alone to four, the most prominent among them being Federal Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti, who was assassinated in Islamabad on March 2 for opposing the country’s controversial blasphemy laws.

Report from Compass Direct News
http://www.compassdirect.org