CAT/C/55/D/512/2012 year-old son in the street for no apparent reason, and when the complainant approached the activists, they told him that Shias are non-believers whose presence is no longer tolerated in Pakistan. When he tried to report the incident, the police refused to register the complaint on the ground that they could not file a report against members of the ruling party. The same day, eight Sunni activists broke into the complainant’s home and beat him, telling him that converts deserved to die. 2.2 The complainant maintains that the local police, rather than providing him with support after the attack in his home, a few days later raided his home and arrested him, keeping him blindfolded and moving him from one place to another without any explanation. He claims that he was detained in a dark cell and given only one meal a day; that he was forced to stay awake throughout the night; that the police officers yelled at him that he would remain in detention unless he renounced his support for the PPP and converted back to the Sunni faith; that the officers beat him, dragged him across the floor, kicked him and interrogated him concerning his involvement with Shia leaders and his activities with the PPP; that he was not allowed family visits or access to a lawyer; and that his entire body and face were swollen due to the constant torture he endured. On one occasion, the complainant was taken into an interrogation room where he was kicked, punched and cursed at, causing him to fall on the floor and crack his nasal bone, which resulted in a loss of blood and blinding pain. The police officers forced him to stand up, gave him a towel for his bleeding nose, and told him they would free him if he signed a blank piece of paper and dated it 19 September 1991. He signed the paper out of fear of further beatings. Later that night, the officers blindfolded him, ushered him into a van and left him in a deserted area about 2 kilometres from his home. He managed to reach a friend whom he called from a nearby grocery store. The friend took him to the hospital, where he underwent an X-ray examination, which revealed a fracture of his eye socket and nasal bone. The complainant stayed at the hospital for a few days to be operated on. During his stay at the hospital, the complainant’s friends told him that his family had left their home to go into hiding in a village in Maqboolpur, which is about 210 kilometres away in the Jhang District. The complainant submits that because his house had been looted and his family had fled, he decided to join his family in the Jhang District. He soon realized, however, that this area was more dangerous, owing to a higher level of religious intolerance. He was soon identified by the leading party as an opponent once he started attending Shia services, and his friends alerted him that he was on the hit list of the political party Sipah-e-Sahaba, and should therefore leave the country. The complainant alleges that when he was in detention, his wife’s uncle, a fanatical Sunni cleric named S.A., had tried to convert the complainant’s wife back to the Sunni faith, and that S.A. had always opposed his niece’s marriage to the complainant because the latter did not belong to the extended family and had ruined his niece’s life by converting to the Shia faith. 2.3 The complainant submits that on 11 August 1992, he managed to flee to the United States of America with counterfeit documents. He filed an asylum application there based on political grounds and did not mention that the main reason for his departure from Pakistan was his religion because he had been told that the American authorities did not accept asylum applications based on religious grounds. The American immigration court, while not challenging his credibility, rejected his application on the ground that the situation was improving in Pakistan. However, the complainant argues that he remained in the United States for the following 10 years because the American authorities were considering granting amnesty for illegal immigrants. The amnesty policy for illegal immigrants was cancelled in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001. The complainant therefore decided to flee to Canada in 2003 and seek asylum there, as he feared being removed to Pakistan, where he believed he would be a victim of an honour crime by his wife’s uncle. 3