Before attack, Pakistani teen sought better life in France
KOTLI QAZI, PAKISTAN >> Ali Hassan was only 15 when he left Pakistan to be smuggled to Europe, following the path of his older brother and many other young men from his home country dreaming of a better life.
Nearly three years later, Hassan is today in a Paris jail after allegedly attacking and seriously wounding two people with a meat cleaver. Before the Sept. 25 attack, he proclaimed in a video he was seeking vengeance after the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo published caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.
Little is known about Hassan’s time in France. There has been confusion over his age, but The Associated Press obtained his official identification documents in Pakistan that confirmed he is currently 18.
French authorities are investigating the Sept. 25 stabbings as an Islamic extremist attack. The stabbings echoed a January 2015 attack on the newspaper that killed 12 of its staffers by militants who claimed they were acting in the name of al- Qaida.
So far, there has been no indication Hassan was connected to any terrorist group. Instead, the wrath of the teenager — far from home in a world vastly different from any he knew — may have roots in Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws.
Hassan’s journey began in his home village of Kotli Qazi, deep in a rural area of Punjab province. The tiny village lies down a narrow, rutted dirt road weaving through vast agricultural fields.
The small cement houses are crowded together, their walls packed with dung patties baking in the blistering noon day sun. By sunset they’ll be peeled off the walls and used to fuel the evening fires.
Many of the young men, including childhood friends of Hassan, said they dreamed of reaching Europe to find prosperity — at least 18 youths from the village have emigrated abroad in recent years. At the same time, they held up Hassan as a hero for carrying out the attack.
In the district where Kotli Qazi is located, a hard-line political party, Tehreek- e Labbaik, holds powerful influence — almost its sole agenda to uphold the blasphemy laws, which call for the death penalty against those who offend Islam. Only a few months after Hassan arrived in France, Labbaik Party-backed protesters rallied and blocked roads in the district and other parts of Pakistan in November 2018, furious that a young Christian woman, Asia Bibi, was freed from death row where she’d faced execution on blasphemy charges.