Gunman kills minority Ahmadiyya man in Pakistan

A man from the minority Ahmadiyya community has been shot and killed in north-western Pakistan, police and community sources said on Wednesday.
This is the latest in the series of hate crimes against the persecuted group.
Kamran Ahmad, 40, was targeted outside the factory he was working in the city of Peshawar, said Saleem Uddin, spokesman for the Ahmadiyya community.
His faith appears to be the sole motive behind the assassination, police official Fahd Khan said, citing preliminary investigations.
No one has been arrested so far, but police are searching for a suspect thought to be a young man, Khan said.
This is the fifth Ahmadiyya man to be fatally targeted for his faith in Peshawar in recent months, said Saleem Uddin.
A doctor and a professor were among the victims.
The most horrific was the murder of a mentally challenged Pakistani-U.S. citizen who was shot and killed inside a courtroom during his trial under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws last year.
The U.S. State Department lamented the killing then, urging Pakistan to repeal blasphemy laws to prevent crimes triggered by religious hatred.
Ahmadiyya, a four million-strong minority group in Pakistan, has faced death, intimidation and a sustained hate campaign for decades.
Ahmadiyya insist they were followers of Islam, but Pakistan declared the group non-Muslim in 1974 for regarding their sect’s founder, Ghulam Ahmad, as a prophet.
More than 260 members of the group have been killed in targeted gun or bomb attacks since 1984 when the sectarian violence started in Pakistan, according to statistics compiled by the community.