Morrison government to subsidise holidaymakers in $1.2 billion tourism and aviation package

Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra

Nearly 800,000 half-price air tickets for travel to and from holiday areas will be provided under a $1.2 billion program to support aviation and tourism, to be announced by the Morrison government on Thursday.

The measures are designed to assist these industries, still hard hit by the effects of the pandemic, after JobKeeper finishes late this month.

The cheap fares will run from April 1 to July 31.

The loan guarantee scheme that operates for small and medium sized businesses is also being expanded and extended for enterprises that leave JobKeeper in the March quarter.

While this is an economy-wide measure, the government says those eligible will be especially in the tourism sector.

Thirteen regions have been designated initially for the cheap flights – the Gold Coast, Cairns, the Whitsundays and Mackay region (Proserpine and Hamilton Island), the Sunshine Coast, Lasseter and Alice Springs, Launceston, Devonport and Burnie, Broome, Avalon, Merimbula, and Kangaroo Island.

The number of tickets will be demand driven, as will the places the flights depart from, but it is estimated there will be about 46,000 discounted fares a week over 17 weeks. A return ticket counts as two discounted fares, the government said.

Under the loan initiative, the maximum size of eligible loans will be increased from the present $1 million to $5 million. The maximum eligible turnover will also be expanded, from $50 million to $250 million.

Maximum loan terms will go from five years to 10 years, and lenders will be allowed to offer borrowers a repayment holiday of up to two years.

Eligible businesses will also be able to use the scheme to refinance their existing loans, so benefitting from the program’s more concessional interest rates.

The government says more than 350,000 businesses which are on JobKeeper are expected to be eligible under the expanded scheme, for which loans will be available from the start of next month and must be approved by the end of December.

For international aviation, there will be support from April until the end of October, when international flights are expected to resumer. The assistance across both airlines will help them maintain their core international capability, keeping 8600 people in work as well as planes flight-ready.

Among the assistance for aviation, several existing support measures are being extended until the end of September, including waivers for air services fees and security charges.

There are also extensions for the business events grants program, the assistance for zoos and aquariums, and the grants to help travel agents.

More than 600,000 people are employed by the tourism sector with domestic tourism worth $100 billion to the economy.

Tourism has suffered severely from the closed international border and from the state border closures and restrictions.

Scott Morrison described the package as “our ticket to recovery … to get Australians travelling and supporting tourism operators, businesses, travel agents and airlines who continue to do it tough through COVID-19, while our international borders remain closed.

“This package will take more tourists to our hotels and cafes, taking tours and exploring our backyard”.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

As holidaymakers arrive, what does COVID-19 mean for rural health services?

Timothy Baker, Deakin University and Cameron Knott, University of Melbourne

At the start of the pandemic, health services in regional cities and small towns braced for a tsunami of cases. Many worried the patient transport system between hospitals would fail, and each hospital would be left to fend for itself. Small hospitals planned makeshift intensive care departments with improvised long-term ventilators. And health-care teams drilled themselves in how they would manage a COVID-positive patient who was deteriorating.

Fortunately, in Australia, these dire predictions were wrong (at least for now). But they could have been right. Rural areas are not immune to COVID-19. In the United States, the current rural infection rate is higher than has ever been recorded in metropolitan areas. A Louisiana hospital described exactly the makeshift intensive care scenario we feared in Australia. Rural patients are more vulnerable too, as the community is older with more chronic health problems.

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Read more:
Rural America is more vulnerable to COVID-19 than cities are, and it’s starting to show

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In rural Australia, dealing with the pandemic has been more like whack-a-mole than an overwhelming wave. Outbreaks occurred around meatworks, local hospitals, and super-spreaders travelling from hotspots.

So, what have we learned so far about the impact of COVID-19 on rural health, and how can we maintain effective rural health care as tourism ramps up?

We must work together

A pandemic lays bare pre-existing structural problems. It exposes the lack of formal channels for rural clinicians to communicate across disciplines and across regions. It reveals the barriers between clinicians in the hospitals and bureaucrats in regional and city offices.

But it also provides an opportunity to connect these groups. During the pandemic, health services across different regions and states shared local solutions. Public health, hospital, community care and inter-hospital services created joint protocols. New communication channels must be maintained and ready for activation if cases increase.

Local knowledge remains important. Embedding local health workers in contact-tracing teams is a strength of NSW’s pandemic defences.

As the Victorian town of Shepparton discovered last week, local outbreaks cause an immediate and massive demand for testing. Using local media to keep rural communities up to date enhances the remarkable support already shown for quarantine measures.

Teleconferencing between clinicians has expanded, as it has between clinicians and patients. It is best and most geographically equitable when it adds to face-to-face local care.

But it may also detract from enabling the best care when it replaces clinicians on the ground. One possible example is that of a woman who died in the emergency department of a regional NSW hospital in September. No doctors were present in person, having been replaced by telehealth treatment outside business hours.

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Read more:
Where did Victoria go so wrong with contact tracing and have they fixed it?

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Self-reliance and silent hypoxia are a bad combination

Identifying patients before they become critically ill is crucial to rural acute care. This is true for COVID-19. The disease has a reasonably predictable path of early fever, improvement, and then a sometimes rapid deterioration in the second week. For all but large regional centres, this means COVID-19 is managed in the community. Deteriorating patients need to be transferred early.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 has a horrible trick. It can cause extremely low levels of blood oxygen without a patient feeling unwell or breathless, or realising their oxygen levels are critically low. This is called silent hypoxia.

Many rural health services have used remote oxygen monitoring tools so clinicians can check in on patients recovering at home.
Shutterstock

It’s a problem everywhere, but it may be worse in rural areas. Patients often visit regional hospitals at a later stage of their illness due to self-reliance, distance to care, and a poorer understanding of the health system. By the time a rural COVID-19 patient thinks they are unwell enough to attend, they may already be close to dying.

Rural health services have had to adopt policies of regular local and remote checking-in for COVID-19 patients, especially in the second week. Telephone and internet connections are not always enough, so many hospitals have bought oxygen-monitoring tools for patients to use at home.

Maintaining normal services is difficult

COVID-19 need only infect a few staff at regional hospitals to make service delivery impossible. In northwest Tasmania, Australian Defence Force members had to replace infected and quarantining staff in mid-April.

Even without an outbreak, COVID makes it difficult to maintain normal operations. Health services relying on fly-in fly-out staff have struggled when staff can no longer travel freely across quarantine lines from the city or across state borders. Exemptions were given but the approval process was slow and many staff still had to do periods of self-quarantine, meaning many staff found it too difficult. Mechanisms to replace or increase staff may still be needed for regions with outbreaks.

Although rural hospitals have been spared the overwhelming numbers of COVID-19 seen in Melbourne hospitals, the extra precautions required to manage patients who could potentially have COVID-19 are draining. Maintaining services reliant on supplies at the end of the supply and logistics chain is slower and challenging. Like metropolitan staff, rural staff are feeling fatigued and requiring extra mental health support.

This is a problem as people move to rural areas for holidays and business. Even in normal years, health services in coastal and other tourist towns are busiest when the population swells in summer. With bookings of holiday accommodation booming in many areas, rural health services may be facing their busiest and most tiring part of the pandemic. If holidaymakers feel leaving the city means leaving behind the risk of infection and the need to socially distance, the results in some rural towns may be catastrophic.

Timothy Baker, Associate Professor and Director, Centre for Rural Emergency Medicine, Deakin University and Cameron Knott, Honorary Clinical Lecturer, Department of Critical Care & Rural Clinical School, University of Melbourne

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

As bushfire and holiday seasons converge, it may be time to say goodbye to the typical Australian summer holiday

David Bowman, University of Tasmania

For 40 years I have studied bushfires in Australia. It has been my life’s work to try to better understand Australian landscapes and the interaction of humans and landscape fire.

As we contemplate a future where catastrophes like the one currently engulfing Australia become increasingly frequent, there’s an idea to which I keep returning: maybe it’s time to say goodbye to the typical summer Australian holiday.

Perhaps it’s time to rearrange Australian calendar and reschedule the peak holiday period to March or April, instead of December and January.

It’s easy to dismiss this idea as stupid but that’s the nature of adaptation. Things that once seemed absurd will now need serious consideration.

What’s truly absurd is the business-as-usual approach that sees thousands of holidaymakers heading directly into forests and national parks right in the middle of peak bushfire season.

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Read more:
Friday essay: living with fire and facing our fears

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All of the indications are that we are galloping into changing fire regimes. We can certainly see that with what’s occurred in the Australian alps (the snow country in southeastern Australia, near Mount Kosciuszko). There were incredibly intense fires there around the early 2000s and now those areas are re-burning.

To me, as a fire researcher, that’s an astonishing thought.

Yes, there have been very large fires in the past but they weren’t followed up with yet more very large fires a mere 15 years later. Normally, you’d be expecting a gap of 50 or 100 years. So the ecology is telling us that we are seeing the intervals between the fires shrinking. That is a really big warning sign.

And this increasingly frequent fire activity is completely consistent with what climate modelling was suggesting. The whole system is moving to a world that is hotter, drier, and with more frequent fire activity. It’s what was forecast and it’s what is now happening.

Big holidays in peak fire season

One of the great exacerbating factors of this crisis is the fact that it’s occurring in a holiday period. It makes things incredibly difficult for emergency management. The fact is that it would be a lot easier for firefighters to focus on stemming fires if they didn’t also have to manage mass evacuations, and deal with populations that are dispersed and far from home.

Scheduling the major Australian holiday at the same time as bushfire season also makes things extremely difficult for the enterprises that depend on the holiday trade. You need certainty to run a business and timing the major annual Australian holiday period with bushfire season strips certainty away from these business owners.

It’s also really terrible for holidaymakers themselves. People are in desperate need of a break, to spend time with family. Instead of returning to work rested and re-energised, many will be stressed, tired, perhaps even traumatised. (And let’s not forget the firefighters themselves, also denied a break with friends and family over the holidays).

And having the major holiday right in the middle of bushfire season also means that many people are denied a chance to experience national parks, as authorities close them off to reduce risk.

Adaptation means change, and change is hard

The old idea was that we can head off the crisis by reducing our emissions through decarbonisation. We had an opportunity to do that and we didn’t take it. We still have to decarbonise but now we also have to adapt.

And the sort of adaptation needed is not just about infrastructure, it’s also about the way we shape our lifestyle, our culture and traditions.

Climate change adaptation will nearly always be met with political, social and cultural resistance. It is not easy. But something like completely rearranging the Australian calendar around increased risks – it’s not even the biggest change required of us.

Some of the other things we are going to have to do will at first seem absurd, will be unbelievably painful economically and will require major adjustments.

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How to monitor the bushfires raging across Australia

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There’s going to need to be a systematic change in behaviour and lifestyle as we adapt.

This crisis occurring in peak holiday time is highlighting the fact that the assumptions of normality we have got are being challenged by climate change.

It is confronting, but adaptation also brings with it great benefits – less loss of life, greater certainty and opportunity for businesses and holidaymakers, and smoother handling of fire crises as they emerge.

We need to put some serious thought into what future life will be like under climate change. Perhaps shifting peak holiday season to the cooler months is the place to start.

David Bowman, Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science, University of Tasmania

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

Why are so few people born on Christmas Day, New Year’s and other holidays?

Holiday birthdays are lonely.
Bryan Keogh/The Conversation via Shutterstock.com

Jay L. Zagorsky, Boston University

Christmas and New Year’s are days of celebration in many parts of the world when people gather with family and friends. One thing many typically don’t celebrate on those days is a birthday.

That’s because Dec. 25 is the least popular day in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand to give birth. In England, Wales and Ireland, it’s the second-least popular, behind Dec. 26, when Brits celebrate Boxing Day.

So why do people have fewer babies on holidays like Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year’s – the second-least popular birthday in the U.S.?

I am personally interested in the question because my wife was a New Year’s Day baby. And as an economist, I find these data puzzles fascinating.

Least and most popular birthdays

All of the least-favored days in the U.S. are tied to holidays, whether it’s Christmas, New Year’s, Fourth of July or Thanksgiving.

Depending on the year and place, between 30% and 40% fewer babies are born on Dec. 25 than on the peak day of the year.

One reason why these days have so few births is almost no cesarean births are scheduled by doctors to happen on public holidays or weekends. About one in three American babies are born this way.

And even in the case of vaginal births, doctors can induce labor, which helps control when babies are born. Inductions also typically don’t happen when doctors want to be out of the office celebrating the holidays with family and friends.

One reason why births on Christmas and New Year’s plummet is that for many people time management and scheduling is paramount.

Interestingly, in England, Wales and New Zealand, relatively few babies are born on April 1. While that date is not a national holiday, mothers might avoid giving birth on April Fools’ Day for fear of their children being taunted or bullied.

As for the most popular birthdays, they tend to happen in the fall. In fact, the top 10 days to have a baby in the U.S. are all in September, while in England, Wales, Ireland and New Zealand they’re in that month or October.

Fall birthdays make sense since many babies are conceived during the colder winter months. Conception is tied to shorter days and lower outside temperatures.

Unrecorded births

Unfortunately, similar data for non-English-speaking countries are not widely available.

Research into when people were born is relatively new because for centuries no one needed or completed a birth certificate. In the U.S., birth certificates have been widely used only since the end of World War II.

While some countries require all births to be registered, one out of every four children born in the world today does not officially exist, since there is no record of his or her birth.

The United Nations has some world data, which show popular birth months tend to shift by latitude. Countries at high latitudes, like Norway or Russia, have peak birth days in July or August. Countries closer to the equator, like El Salvador, have peak birth days later in the year, like October.

As for my wife, she was born a few hours after her parents welcomed in another year. Her birth was a surprise to all the guests they invited over to celebrate the New Year. We joke that being born then is the best day, because there is always a party with fireworks for her birthday. It is also a great day because there are never any competing birthday parties.

So if you are born on a holiday like Christmas, New Year’s or even April Fools’ Day, take some comfort in knowing the relative rarity of your birth makes you even more special than you already are.

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]

Jay L. Zagorsky, Senior Lecturer, Questrom School of Business, Boston University

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

PAKISTAN: PASTORS ARRESTED FOR USE OF LOUDSPEAKERS

Police claim amplified Easter Sunday service defamed Islam.

ISTANBUL, May 27 (Compass Direct News) – Nine pastors from two neighboring villages in Pakistan could face prison time for using loudspeakers to broadcast prayers and sermons from their churches on Easter Sunday.

Martinpur and Youngsnabad, 150 kilometers (93 miles) east of Lahore, are majority Christian villages. The nine pastors who lead congregations there say that local Muslim security forces have twisted the law to solicit a bribe.

Police arrested and detained Hafeez Gill, Fahim John, Maksud Ulkaq, and a catechist from the Catholic Church in Youngsnabad identified only as Saqab at 10 a.m. on May 16. While en route to the police station, the officers told them they would be released if they offered a bribe, according to the Centre for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS). The pastors refused and were detained, but following a public outcry from their parishioners they were released at 2:30 p.m.

Reports indicate the arrest was premeditated. A leader in the village council invited the pastors to his house for a meeting, but when they arrived in the morning local police were waiting for them.

They were taken to the police station, where Station House Officer Mirza Latif showed them two First Instance Reports (FIR) registered on May 11 claiming they had misused their speakers. The FIRs, however, state the pastors misused the speakers on Easter Sunday, which happened nearly a month earlier.

The FIRs accused the pastors of misusing their loudspeakers under Section 3/4 of the Amplifier Act. Their attorney said the reasons for their arrest were both religiously and financially motivated.

Police claimed that the church leaders had used their loudspeakers to amplify messages defaming Islam. The FIRs, however, make no mention of the content of their remarks.

“The police wanted to cause humiliation to the pastors and were also asking for money,” said CLAAS attorney Akhbar Durrani.

The case was registered by a special branch of local police forces charging the four Youngsnabad pastors. On the same day, they filed charges against the five pastors in Martinpur: Shahazad Kamarul-Zaman, Mumbarab Kuhram, Hanuk Daniel, Amar Sohail, and a fifth pastor unnamed in the police report.

Nasir Bahatti, president of the Youth Welfare Association in Youngsnabad, a Christian social organization, said the church had permission to amplify the service and that the arrests were religiously motivated.

“There is no reason to ban the loudspeaker,” he said. “They are banning our worship and prayer. But we have permission [to use them] on particular days such as Christmas and Easter.”

If the FIRs are not withdrawn, the pastors will go to court over the alleged loudspeaker violation. Police released them from jail on May 16 under the condition that they obtain bail at an upcoming hearing.

The church loudspeakers broadcasted the church prayers and sermon for villagers unable to attend the service, as is custom in some Christian villages. Pakistani law limits the use of loudspeakers in Christian worship services to a specific time allotment (and usually to villages and towns with a small Muslim population), but these restrictions were not enforced in the almost-entirely Christian villages of Youngsnabad and Martinpur.

Few such restrictions, however, are placed on Pakistani mosques. The five daily calls to prayer, Friday sermons, and Quran recitations on Islamic holidays are frequently amplified on loudspeakers. The double standard follows a traditional Islamic dictum in which church bells were not allowed to ring in areas under Islamic rule.

“The Muslims in this nation can worship according to their prayer method, so why can’t we if we are all given equal rights?” Bahatti said.

The standard of living is relatively high in these villages due to a well-educated population. There are longstanding missionary schools in the villages, and much of the population has lived abroad. English missionaries founded Youngsnabad and Martinpur 120 years ago during British colonial occupation.

Some rights groups worry that the harassment of Pakistani Christians in villages such as Martinpur and Youngsnabad could mean deteriorating conditions for religious minorities in areas once considered secure.

CLAAS reported that vandals completely ransacked a church in Bannu Cantt, in the North West Frontier Province, on May 12. They destroyed the altar, burned Bibles, and broke pews. Although the city is located in a province that borders Afghanistan, where Taliban rebels have been active, it was thought to be a relatively secure area, according to the report.

Pakistan remains in turmoil as the military moves into Swat Valley to uproot the Taliban, which has established Islamic law (sharia) in the embattled area. An estimated 2 million Pakistanis have become refugees by fleeing the area after a government evacuation order.

Report from Compass Direct News

PAKISTAN: CHRISTIANS ACQUITTED IN ‘BLASPHEMY’ CASE

Religious reconciliation meetings produce first such acquittal as imams issue fatwa.

ISTANBUL, January 23 (Compass Direct News) – Five Christians charged with “blasphemy” against Islam during April 2007 religious holidays were released on Monday (Jan. 19) after reconciliation meetings between Christian and Islamic leaders – the first verdict to have resulted from such efforts in Pakistan.

A Punjab court released Salamat Masih, 42, his 16-year-old son Rashid, and their relatives Ishfaq, Saba and Dao Masih after a judge acquitted them. Their acquittal and release came through out-of-court meetings between Muslim leaders and a Christian Non-Governmental Organization.

“This is a wonderful sign that has made history,” said Shahzad Kamran, a case worker for Sharing Life Ministries Pakistan (SLMP), which negotiated with the Muslim leaders. “This case can set a precedent for future blasphemy cases against Christians.”

The reconciliation meetings between SLMP and local and national imams began last November. Rather than attempt to settle the matter in court, the legal advocacy group sought out Muslim leaders directly to persuade them that the accused were innocent; the Islamic clerics then compelled area Muslims to drop their charges.

The meetings took place between four Islamic clergymen, National Assembly Representative Mushtaq Ahmed and Sohail Johnson of the SLMP. Ahmed was unavailable for comment in spite of repeated attempts to contact him.

Johnson of SLMP took precautionary measures to keep from being exposed to violence, meeting with the imams in neutral locations away from mosques and Muslim parts of the city. The SLMP team managed to convince the Islamic clerics to release the Christians by persuading them that the alleged blasphemy grew from a misunderstanding.

“There is permission granted in Islamic law that if someone unintentionally commits an offense, it can be reconciled,” Johnson said. “[The cleric] said he would do it because he did not want to bring harm and injustice to the community.”

The Islamic clergymen agreed to issue a fatwa (religious edict) declaring the accused men innocent of blasphemy. The Muslim witnesses in the case withdrew their testimony on Jan. 13, and District Judge Sheik Salahudin acquitted the five men in a Toba Tek Singh court.

The legal advocates involved in the case said they would employ reconciliation in future cases of false blasphemy charges. They said that battling such cases in court can still free innocent people, but it does not help to solve sectarian strife that leads to violence and false charges.

But with reconciliation meetings, “the word of God has affected the hearts of the Muslims and changed their behavior,” Johnson said. “With our good behavior we can change the people.”

The SLMP’s Kamran said the imams declared the defendants innocent because they knew the men did not intentionally insult the Islamic religion. The situation likely escalated because it took place during an Islamic holiday, with the April 2007 Muslim celebration of Eid-e-Millad-ul-Nabi (Muhammad’s birthday) turning into mob violence after the spread of false rumors against Christians. Local Christian Ratan Masih was severely injured. Other Christians fled for fear of their lives, according to SLMP.

Approximately 2,000 Muslims attacked Christian Colony, a Christian neighborhood, stoning houses and torturing Christians, according to an SLMP report. Initially the mob violence began over a quarrel between Rashid Masih’s younger brother Daniel, 12, and a Muslim child named Sunny. In the course of the argument, a sticker fell off Sunny’s shirt that bore the words Yah Rasool Allah, a reference to Muhammad as God’s messenger.

A local resident, Mohammed Farsal, saw the sticker on the ground and accused the Christian children of blasphemy. Violence soon broke out, and police eventually arrested all five men on charges of insulting Islam.

Blasphemy charges against non-Muslims are not uncommon in Pakistan and are typically applied in cases of sectarian violence. Islamic leaders are often under community pressure to blame Christians in these situations.

Human rights lawyers hope this case sets a precedent for future blasphemy cases, with spurious charges of insulting Islam or its prophet becoming more difficult to press.

Other legal cases of blasphemy continue in Pakistan, including the arrest of Munir Masih and his wife Ruqiya Bibi for insulting Islam. They were granted bail yesterday in Kasur.

At the hearing, 20 local Muslims pressured the judge not to grant them bail, according to a report from the Centre for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement.

On Wednesday (Jan. 21), Hector Aleem from Islamabad was falsely accused of blasphemy, most likely as a backlash to his role as a human rights activist, the report said.

Christian lawmakers in the Muslim-majority country of 170 million hope to curb these legal abuses by abolishing Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.  

Report from Compass Direct News

BANGLADESH: PASTOR’S WIFE GANG-RAPED, HOME ROBBED

Influential Muslim villagers, local media said to falsely blame Christians, Hindu.

VENNABARI, Bangladesh, January 20 (Compass Direct News) – The pastor of a Baptist church in this village about a 100 kilometers (62 miles) south of Dhaka said that earlier this month local Muslims tied him and his wife up, robbed his living quarters on the church property and gang-raped his wife.

The Rev. Shankar Hazra, 55, of Chaksing Baptist church in Gopalganj district, said that before leaving, the assailants desecrated the church building.

The night of the attack, the pastor said, he and his wife, 45, went out to a toilet outside their home at about 2 a.m. on Jan. 6.

“Suddenly a man loomed up from the darkness and thrust the snout of a homemade rifle at my chest and told me to keep mum, otherwise both of us would be killed,” Rev. Hazra told Compass. “Around seven to eight people swooped on us and tied me and my wife. They blindfolded my wife and took her inside the house.”

While Rev. Hazra was tied to a pillar on the porch of his house of corrugated tin and wood, the assailants took the keys of chests and trunks and looted valuables: gold and silver jewelry worth US$500, cash totaling US$300, a mobile phone, television, CD players, all their clothes except his cassock, and utensils.

“They even looted my daughters’ dresses,” Rev. Hazra told Compass. “After looting everything, they gang-raped my wife.”

The assailants also asked about the whereabouts of his two grown daughters, who had left the previous day after spending the Christmas and New Year holidays with their parents. Their daughters, ages 22 and 20, had returned to their studies in separate districts.

“If my daughters had been present in the house at that night, they would have been victims as their mother was,” Rev. Hazra said.

After the assailants left, Rev. Hazra managed to untie himself and found his wife lying unconscious on the bed, he said.

“My neighbors came and rushed her to a nearby hospital, and that hospital referred my wife to another big hospital in Gopalganj district because her condition was very serious,” he said.

The assailants also broke the door of the church building and urinated and defecated there, Rev. Hazra added.

 

Non-Muslims Blamed

Rev. Hazra and his wife said all of the assailants were Muslims, but that villagers tried to implicate non-Muslims and portray the attack as resulting from internal conflicts among Christians.

Police, influential villagers and local Muslim-owned media are trying to conceal likely anti-Christian motives for the crime, he said, by falsely accusing two Christians and a Hindu of participating – and labeling a local Baptist pastor as the “mastermind” of the attack. Police wrote the First Information Report (FIR) implicating the Christians and Hindu based on lies from villagers, and Rev. Hazra signed it without reading it due to his shaken state, he said.

Rev. Hazra’s wife, Depali Hazra, later filed an affidavit contesting the FIR in which the two Christians and one Hindu, along with a known criminal who is Muslim, were accused of the gang rape and theft. The Christians and Hindu were not involved in the rape and robbery, she reported in the affidavit.

“I was seriously ill after [the] gang rape, and my husband’s mind was unhinged at that time,” she reported. “Only [the] Muslim man Ilias Mridha and his yes-men did it. When I recuperated a little bit from illness, I came to know about the names of the Christians and Hindu in the case. Spontaneously and knowledgably I did this affidavit to get rid of those Christian and Hindu names from the case copy.”

Local police inspector Liakat Ali confirmed to Compass that non-Muslims had been implicated in the rape and theft charges filed at the police station. Other statements in the FIR – such as the number of assailants, four, rather than the seven or eight cited by the pastor – are at odds with Rev. Hazra’s account, further indicating that police relied on second-hand information from villagers rather than the experience related by the victims.

“We have arrested three people so far in connection with gang rape and looting out of four people mentioned in the FIR by Hazra,” said Ali. “Among those mentioned, two people are Christians, one Hindu and one Muslim. According to the case information, the mastermind of the incident is Monotosh Banarjy, a pastor of a Baptist church, who might not have been present at that time.”

There is no criminal record against the Christian arrested, Sushil Baroi, a Catholic, he said.

“But the arrested Muslim man, Ilias Mridha, is a criminal who had been arrested several times before,” said Ali.

Local Christians said Mridha, 38, who has been jailed several times, commits crimes under the direction of local influential persons.

Father Jacob Gobbi, head priest at Baniarchar Catholic Church, told Compass that Baroi was not involved in the gang rape and robbery.

“He is innocent, and we want that he should be released as soon as possible,” Fr. Gobbi said.

Rev. Hazra said he and his wife are living temporarily with her relatives as protection from further attacks at their church quarters.  

Report from Compass Direct News