A woman has been sentenced to death for 'blasphemous' WhatsApp and Facebook messages.
Aneeqa Ateeq given a death sentence by a court in Rawalpindi, Pakistan after being found guilty.
It followed a complaint under the country's cybercrime and blasphemy law
The charge sheet stated Ateeq, 26, met her accuser through a mobile gaming app and the pair began chatting over social networking platform WhatsApp.
She was accused of sending blasphemous caricatures of holy prophets and making comments about “holy personages”.
Her Facebook account also carried 'blasphemous material' in other accounts and charges said “deliberately and intentionally defiles sacred righteous personalities and insulted the religious beliefs of Muslims”. reports The Guardian.
But Ateeq, a practising Muslim, denied all the charges.
She told the court she believed the complainant "intentionally" involved her in a religious discussion to gather evidence and take “revenge” after she would not be friends with him.
She was found guilty by the court, given a 20-year sentence and ordered to be hanged.
Ateeq’s lawyer Syeda Rashida Zainab reportedly said: “I can’t comment on the judgment as the issue is very sensitive.”
The country is an Islamic state and regularly issues death sentences, but executions are not carried out and the accused spend their lives in jail.
Accused people are often killed by vigilantes before courts come to a verdict.
And judges rarely acquit those who are accused of blasphemy and are pressured into reaching guilty verdicts.
Pakistan has recently asked Facebook and Twitter to help identify its citizens suspected of blasphemy so it can prosecute them or pursue their extradition.
Muslims in the country have also faced blasphemy charges by the cases are heard quickly in a closed court, away from public scrutiny.
Evidence has also been questioned in some cases, such as the case of Pastor Zafar Bhatti, who was been accused of text messages which abused the prophet Muhammad’s mother.
The alleged blasphemous texts came from a number that did not belong to him but he was sentenced to death for the charges.
Social media has become a new place for blasphemy cases, but the 2016 Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) allowed the government more powers to control social media content.
In 2017 Taimoor Raza was sentenced to death for allegedly committing blasphemy on Facebook,
A Sri Lankan national working in a factory in Pakistan was last month beaten to death and his body set on fire by a mob after he removing religious posters factory walls causing balsphemy acusations
Around 80 people in Pakistan are in prison for the crime, with at least half sentenced to death, but there have been no executions.
