Ahmadi man barred from burying wife in Pakistan graveyard

A man from the minority Ahmadi community has been barred from burying his wife in a graveyard in Pakistan's Punjab province by a group of Muslims.
The wife of Iqbal Ranhja, a resident of Faisalabad district, died yesterday.
When Ranhja and members of the Ahmadi community took the body for burial at the graveyard in Kathowali, a group of Muslims led by a local cleric intercepted them and asked them to bury the dead at some other place.
Before the two groups entered into a brawl, police reached there and persuaded the Ahmadis to bury their dead at some other place.

Finally, the Ahmadis agreed to bury the dead several kilometres away from the town.
Earlier, a group of extremists had stopped an Ahmadi family from buring its two-year-old child in a local Muslim graveyard in Toba Tek Singh district near Faisalabad.

The Ahmadis had buried the child in a piece of land located some distance away from the graveyard.
Pakistan's Ahmadis consider themselves Muslim but were declared non-Muslims through a constitutional amendment in 1974.
A decade later, they were barred from proselytising or identifying themselves as Muslims.
Some 1.5 million Ahmadis live across the country.