Islamabad, Pakistan - The Pakistan Supreme Court Friday directed three Hindu sisters who converted to Islam to meet their parents after their father filed a petition saying his daughters were forced to marry Muslim men and were not allowed to meet him.
Sanu Umra, the father of the three women, had filed the application in the apex court alleging that his daughters had been abducted and forcibly converted to Islam.
However, the women - Reema, 21, Usha, 19, and Reema, 17 - who appeared in the court clad in shawls - said they had changed their religion by choice and were not forced by anyone to convert to Islam.
The three women have changed their names to Nida, Anum and Afshan.
The Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and comprising judges Javed Buttar and Tassadaq Hussain Jillani ordered the Karachi police chief to keep the girls in the Edhi Home till further orders and said that their parents should be allowed to meet them.
The women initially said they did not want to meet their parents but on the instance of the court, agreed to meet them at Edhi Home, a centre for homeless women run by the Abdul Sattar Edhi Welfare Trust.
"We have left our home and religion by ourselves and no one forced us into this...we used to listen to Islamic programmes on television and decided to convert to Islam," Reema told the court.
She said that since they feared opposition from their family, they kept their conversion a secret and sought the help of a man named Suleman who, with the help of his two colleagues, took them to Jamiat-ul-Uloom Islamia at Binori town near Karachi, where they are studying and living.
The women told media they had converted to Islam at Jamiat-ul-Uloom Islamia before Ghulam Haider Chunarh, a justice of peace of the government of Sindh province.
Asked if they were going to marry these men, none of the women responded.
The chief justice directed that the parents and relatives of the women be allowed to meet them freely. He said a change of religion did not imply that parents could be ignored and asked the women to respect their family members.
The court also directed police to submit weekly reports about the welfare and arrangements for protection of the women.
However, Raja Hussain, lawyer for their father, said the women had already been forced to marry the three men. He alleged that the women were kidnapped and harassed by the men.
Earlier, their father had lodged a complaint with Karachi police that the three men named Abid, Suleman and Jehanzaib kidnapped his daughters and forced them to convert to Islam. He also alleged his daughters were being kept by the men in a madrassa or seminary.
The alleged kidnappers, who were presented in the court handcuffed, were freed on the court's orders after the women said the men had only helped them and had not kidnapped them.
The Supreme Court also took notice of an application by the Supreme Court Bar Association chief that said some groups were forcing non-Muslims to embrace Islam.
The chief justice said the court would take up this matter in the next hearing.