At 2.30pm on 16 May, Dr Sheikh Mahmood arrived at Fatima Hospital in Sargodha, Punjab Province, Pakistan and proceeded to attend to his patients as per his routine. A highly respected gastroenterologist and hepatologist, Dr Mahmood was widely known for his dedication, professional excellence and compassionate nature.
But on this day – as he walked through the corridor of the hospital that he had worked in for the past seven years – an unidentified gunman opened fire on him from behind before fleeing the scene while openly brandishing a pistol. He sustained two gunshot wounds and was immediately transferred to Civil Hospital Sargodha, where he succumbed to his injuries. He leaves behind a mother, wife, two daughters and two sons.
Dr Mahmood, 58, had no known personal enmities and Sargodha police have yet to confirm the motive behind the killing, however recent developments in Pakistan give much and highly-concerning reason to believe that he was likely targeted because of his faith – that is, because he was an Ahmadi Muslim.
A concerning uptick
Dr Mahmood’s murder marked the third faith-based killing of an Ahmadi within a single month. On 18 April, a mob of around 400 workers affiliated with the far-right Islamist party Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) stormed an Ahmadi mosque in the Saddar neighbourhood of Karachi, Sindh Province in an attempt to prevent members of the community from taking part in Friday prayers.
Approximately 40-50 Ahmadis were temporarily trapped in the mosque as the assailants surrounded them and chanted anti-Ahmadi slogans, with police and rangers eventually arriving to disperse the mob.
One man, Laeeq Ahmad Cheema, 46, had reportedly recorded a video of the attackers, and was known to some of them as an eyewitness to an earlier attack on the same place of worship in 2023. It is likely for these reasons that he was violently beaten by the group, and ultimately succumbed to his injuries at Karachi’s Civil Hospital.
Less than a week later, on the evening of 24 April, 19-year-old Muhammad Asif and his cousin Ihsan Ahmad were ambushed and fired upon by five armed assailants in Kasur in Punjab Province. Asif is reported to have died instantly, while Ahmad was critically injured and later transferred to Lahore for treatment.
A history of hostility
The Ahmadiyya community has been the most widely institutionally and constitutionally persecuted religious group in Pakistan for decades.
In 1974 the government introduced a constitutional amendment which made Pakistan the only country to declare Ahmadis to be non-Muslims by law. A decade later, in April 1984, the government promulgated Ordinance XX, introducing Sections 298 (B) and (C) to the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC), which made it a criminal offence for Ahmadis to identify themselves as Muslims, either ‘directly or indirectly’, punishable with up to three years’ imprisonment and a fine.
Such developments greatly emboldened hard-line Islamists who had long deemed the community to be heretical for recognising its founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as a prophet, in contrast with the majority of Muslims who believe that Mohammed was the final prophet, and ultimately led to widespread societal hostility towards Ahmadis that persists throughout Pakistan today.
According to the International Human Rights Desk (IHRD) of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in the UK, six Ahmadis were murdered for their faith in 2024 – a significant increase on one religiously motivated murder in 2023 – with 22 Ahmadi mosques attacked and 308 Ahmadi graves desecrated in the same period.
The situation appears to be deteriorating further still this year. On 28 February at least 28 Ahmadis were arrested and 23 others had a criminal case registered against them in three separate incidents in Punjab, two days prior to the start of Ramadan; 269 Ahmadi graves have reportedly been desecrated across 11 separate attacks in 2025 alone; and on 11 May 71-year-old Tahir Mahmood Sahib died in custody two months after he and two others were arrested and imprisoned in Malir, Karachi, for offering Friday prayers.
The wider implications
A particularly concerning facet of the recent killings is that in all three cases it appears the victims were targeted simply because they were Ahmadis. None of them had been accused of blasphemy – as is often the case in incidents of religious violence and hatred in Pakistan – not that it would have justified the attacks on any of them.
While Cheema may have been known to his killers as a witness to a previous attack, the group he was praying with had not done anything on that particular Friday – nor on the day of the previous incident – to provoke the gathering of a hundreds-strong mob around their place of worship, and if anything it appears that his murder was a crime of opportunity. Meanwhile, as with Dr Mahmood, no reports have emerged of individuals being known to have had grievances with Asif or his cousin Ahmad.
Ultimately this has disturbing implications not just for the Ahmadi community, but for Pakistan’s entire social fabric. It is not unreasonable to imagine, for example, that with tensions heightened between India and Pakistan in the wake of the Pahalgam terrorist attack in Kashmir, Hindus may be singled out for being perceived as supportive of India; or that persisting hostilities towards Christians may escalate into the blanket targeting of sanitation workers due to the disproportionate representation of that religious group within those roles.
Time for accountability
This week marks the 15th anniversary of co-ordinated attacks on two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore that killed 94 people and injured over 100 more. So deep-rooted was the hatred of the Islamist extremists responsible that three days later gunmen attacked the hospital where the injured were being treated, killing a further 12 policemen and hospital staff.
A decade and a half has passed since then, and yet the recent killings of Laeeq Ahmad Cheema, Muhammad Asif and Dr Sheikh Mahmood highlight just how resolutely the government of Pakistan has failed to end the violent persecution of this community, and the impunity that surrounds those who attack them.
Realistically there is no domestic political will to change this, and thus it falls to the international community – and especially countries and bodies with whom Pakistan has close relations, such as the UK and the European Union – to hold the government to account. States must not grant preferential economic treatment to an administration that continues to openly undermine its human rights commitments. They must impose sanctions and deny visas to individuals with known links to extremist groups such as the TLP. Above all, they must emphasise and champion the fundamental right to freedom of religion or belief not just for Ahmadis but for all Pakistani citizens at every appropriate opportunity.
By CSW’s Press & Public Affairs Officer Ellis Heasley