A judge in Pakistan on May 16 handed custody of a Catholic girl to the Muslim who kidnapped and forcibly married her despite evidence that she was coerced into stating she converted to Islam, her father said.

“My daughter Jessica Iqbal couldn’t recite the Kalima [Islamic conversion proclamation] or respond to any other question about Islam in the courtroom,” Iqbal Masih told Christian Daily International-Morning Star News. “It was quite evident that she had been forced to claim that she had willingly converted her faith, yet the magistrate still allowed her to go with her abductor.”

Masih, a house painter in Chungi Amarsidhu, Lahore, Punjab Province, said his 32-year-old Muslim neighbor, Azeem Ullah, took his 16-year-old daughter from their house in the early hours of April 30.

“I don’t know how Azeem Ullah fooled my innocent child into going with him,” Masih said. “We have no idea how or since when he had been grooming her into doing this. She was clearly enticed by the man who is almost double her age.”

Masih registered an abduction case against Ullah the same day, but police released him after some hours, he said.

“Azeem Ullah had returned home after hiding my daughter somewhere to show that he wasn’t involved in her disappearance,” Masih said. “I was very hopeful that he would reveal Jessica’s whereabouts during police interrogation, but I was shocked when they freed him. I requested the investigating officer to at least restrict Azeem Ullah from leaving his house till Jessica’s recovery, but he fled after three days.”

On May 16, Jessica appeared before Judicial Magistrate Hassan Sarfraz Cheema in Lahore and recorded her statement, in which she claimed that she had converted to Islam and married Ullah of her free will, Masih said.

“My wife and I begged Jessica to reconsider her statement, but she told us that she was helpless,” he said. “She was clearly under immense pressure to speak in her abductor’s favor because she repeatedly said that she was fearful for our lives.”

Masih said that he and his wife were in agony over their daughter’s well-being.

“Our lives have been completely devastated,” he said. “I’m unable to focus on my work, as my mind is always thinking about Jessica. This mental anguish is killing me with each passing day.”

Sohail Habil of HARDS Pakistan, which is supporting the Masih family’s legal struggle, said that in 99 percent of such cases, victims are coerced into giving false statements as kidnappers threaten to harm them or their families.

“In Jessica’s case, the magistrate could clearly see that there was no truth in her religious conversion, but sadly he did not take any action,” Habil told Christian Daily International-Morning Star News.  

The group has now petitioned the sessions court to challenge the judge’s order, he added.

Typically, kidnapped girls in Pakistan, some as young as 10, are abducted, forced to convert to Islam and raped under cover of Islamic “marriages” and are then pressured to record false statements in favor of the kidnappers, rights advocates say. Judges routinely ignore documentary evidence related to the children’s ages, handing them back to kidnappers as their “legal wives.”

Amid a proliferation of such cases, Pakistan’s parliament on May 19 passed a significant bill aiming to curb, discourage and eventually eradicate child marriages in the federal capital territory by raising the legal age of marriage for both sexes to 18 years, and prescribing stern punishment for violators.

A bill criminalizing child marriage also has been pending in the Punjab Assembly since April 2024. Pending approval of the bill, the minimum age for girls to marry is still 16. Christian activists say that the enactment of this law would help in curbing forced faith conversions and marriages of minority girls in Punjab province, which is home to over 1.5 million Christians.

Nationally, the Christian Marriage (Amendment) Act 2024 set the marriageable age at 18 only for Christians; if they convert to Islam, girls considered Muslims come under sharia (Islamic law), which allows them to marry younger.

Pakistan, whose population is 96-percent Muslim, ranked eighth on Open Doors’ 2025 World Watch List of the most difficult places to be a Christian.