NEW YORK, June 4 (UPI) -- Leaders of the minority Ahmadiyya religious community called on international leaders to prevent their extermination at the hands of Pakistani extremists.
Naseem Mahdi, a top missionary official for the U.S. Ahmadi community, issued a global appeal in the wake of attacks on the religious group in Pakistan.
"The time is now for the world to wake up to the realization that the goal of the extremist clerics is to execute a full-scale holocaust" he was quoted in Pakistan's Dawn newspaper as saying.
The Pakistani Taliban was blamed for attacks on the Ahmadiyya religious minority in recent days. Two separate attacks on Ahmadiyya mosques and a hospital in Lahore killed around 100 people.
Officials at a hospital in Sindh province said they received death threats in a letter accusing the hospital of religious discrimination
Mahdi told a delegation in New York that Washington should target some of its $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan to help religious minority groups.
"The U.S. government must take every measure in its power to have all levels of government in Pakistan eliminate the laws and ordinances that have become the tools to facilitate and institutionalize the persecution of Ahmadi Muslims," he said.
Pakistan in a 1974 ruling said the sect was non-Muslim. Their followers support a peaceful interpretation of Islam.
