Someway, somehow, someone will try.
U.S. citizen slain over his religion in his native Pakistan
When Habib Peer closed his Germantown newsstand last year and moved back to Pakistan, his passport made no note of his religion.
Since 1990 he had been a resident and citizen of the United States, where being an Ahmadiyya Muslim is no offense. But in his homeland, Peer's faith made him a target, his family said.
On Thursday, as he drove with a young nephew through the southern city of Sanghar, two motorbikes approached his car. One of the masked drivers fired a handgun twice through the open window, instantly killing the 60-year-old Peer.
His nephew, 13, survived to describe the assassination. "That's just how [the boy's] father died," recalled Mujeeb Chaudhary, Peer's brother-in-law and a Philadelphia pharmacist.
"It was a targeted killing, only because of his religion."
Four years earlier, Peer's brother, Pasha, a physician who cared for the poor of Sanghar, was shot twice in the head as he left his clinic one evening. His killer ran off and was never found.
Widowed the year his brother died, Peer had moved back to Pakistan to care for Pasha's widow, whom he married, and to help raise his brother's children.
Ahmadis follow the Indian mystic Mirza Gulam Ahmad, who in 1887 announced that he was the messiah, or Mahdi, predicted in early Islamic writings as one who would purify Islam near the end of time.
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