MOSCOW, October 14 (RIA Novosti) - Britain plans to deport a Pakistani activist, involved in political and human rights campaigns against the killing of Shias, despite multiple death threats from extremist groups towards the campaigner, The Guardian reported Tuesday.
"The threatening letters that were sent to my home say very clearly if I don't stop talking against the extremist groups or if I come back to Pakistan they will behead me," Liaquat Ali Hazara, a campaigner for a Shia minority group called the Hazaras told The Guardian in a phone interview from the detention center where he is currently being held.
Hazara will be sent by the UK government to Quetta, the Balochistan capital in Pakistan on October 21, according to The Guardian. Some 500 Hazaras have been killed in Balochistan since 2008 and Hazara worries he will be next. Killings from extremist groups are on the rise, but the Pakistani government has done little to defuse the situation.
"My life is genuinely in danger, and the Home Office is not listening," Hazara, who has been in detention since July said.
"I would like to request Human Rights Groups to campaign for me and exert more meaningful pressure," Hazara was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
Death threats have been delivered to his home where his wife and parents live in addition to emails traced to Karachi and Hyderabad, towns several hundred miles away from Quetta.
Hazara founded the Hazara United Movement, a political campaign group, following the attack on Shia Muslim pilgrims en route to the Iranian border which resulted in some 25 deaths. The attack was carried out in 2011 by Sunni gunmen who opened fire on a bus in western Pakistan. Hazara's political group, aimed at bringing attention to worsening Sunni-Shia relations, launched protests, sit-ins, and a campaigning blog. The group was threatened by the Taliban and Lashkar-e Jhangvi, a Sunni militant group, in 2010 and 2011.
Hazara claimed asylum in the UK in September 2012. Two reports from a legal expert have been rejected by the UK Home Office as insufficient grounds for asylum and the activist has been refused a request for a judicial review of the case, The Guardian reported.
