Pakistani Christian Ranjha Masih has spent eight and a half years in solitary confinement on a charge of blasphemy.  Yesterday the Lahore High Court ruled the accusation unsupported and acquitted him.

At the end of a two-hour appeal hearing on the case, Presiding Justice Asif Saeed Khan Khausa ruled that the lack of any solid evidence against Masih required him to issue a complete acquittal.

Lawyer Justin Gill, who led Masih’s defense team, said he expected a prison release order for the former hospital worker to be issued tomorrow. “So within two or three more days, he should be out of jail,” Gill said. “I think he doesn’t even know this yet himself, but we have told his wife.”

Even though the High Court has declared him innocent of the charge, he still has to be kept hidden away from vengeful Muslims.

But Masih’s problems are not over yet: he has received death threats and the Christian community will keep him in hiding for his safety as soon as he comes out of prison. There have been suggestions that he emigrate to Germany.

Mr Masih was arrested in 1998 for allegedly damaging a sign containing words from the Quran and sentenced to life in prison by a lower court in 2003.

The High Court judgment was largely based on serious discrepancies and contradictions in testimony from purported eyewitnesses.  The same discrepancies were also apparent in the lower-court trial.  The court also noted that Masih had been charged under the wrong section of Pakistan’s infamous anti-blasphemy law, and that the section under which he was convicted imposes the death penalty, not life imprisonment.

Is there anything the lower court got right in this case?

Last June, the International Society for Human Rights paid tribute to Masih by bestowing its Stephen Endowment Award for “steadfastness in maintaining his Christian beliefs.”

Previous related post: Pakistan to block “blasphemous” websites