CAT/C/34/D/222/2002 page 6 4.10 The State party finds the importance which the complainant attaches to apostasy surprising, particularly since he did not make the claim until 26 September 2002 when he requested a review of the initial decision by the Swiss Asylum Review Commission. Given that the complainant finds the point crucial, the State party feels that he might reasonably have been expected to mention it earlier in the asylum proceedings. The complainant explains the omission in his application for review partly by saying that he was ashamed, partly by saying that he feared the consequences of his apostasy, and lastly by saying that he did not realize the importance of the point until after the Commission handed down its decision on 5 August 2002. The State party finds this explanation unconvincing. 4.11 Even if the allegations of apostasy were credible, they would not necessarily mean that the complainant would be in danger of being tortured if sent home to Pakistan. The complainant says that his fellow students discovered his apostasy in December 1998 and made serious threats against him thereafter. The State party points out that if the police or the complainant’s Muslim opponents had really wanted to arrest or disturb him, they could easily have found him at his family’s second home while he was living there between January and July 1999. But they did not. On the contrary, the complainant was left untroubled both in his second home and in Karachi, where he lived from August 1999 until his departure in September 1999. It is also surprising, the State party finds, that the Lahore police report of 9 February 1998 explicitly mentions that the complainant is a Christian when the complainant claims to have presided over the branch of the Muslim Students Federation at his faculty from October-November 1997 onwards, his apostasy becoming common knowledge only in December 1998. 4.12 The State party alludes to the Committee’s case law to the effect that the existence of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights in a country does not as such constitute a sufficient ground for determining that a particular person would be in danger of being subjected to torture upon his return to that country; additional grounds must be adduced for the risk of torture to qualify as “foreseeable, real and personal” for the purposes of article 3, paragraph 1, of the Convention. 3 Last, the State party refers to general comment No. 1, on the application of article 3, in which the Committee specifies that “the risk of torture must be assessed on grounds that go beyond mere theory or suspicion”. 4.13 Christians in Pakistan do not, generally speaking, appear to the State party to be persecuted. In principle they can live their own lives without really being harassed. The complainant’s case proves it, the State party argues, as his curriculum vitae goes to show. The complainant has, for example, regularly been able to attend various Christian congresses abroad. He has been able to visit Christian prisoners every week. Besides, his family, which is also Christian, seems to be able to live without major difficulty in Pakistan. 4.14 As regards threats to the complainant’s life or physical safety from supporters of the Muslim Students Federation or his former fellow students, the State party points out that article 3 of the Convention must be interpreted in the light of article 1. Article 1 of the Convention defines the perpetrators of torture, limiting the scope of the notion to public officials or other persons acting in an official capacity, or others acting at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of such officials or other persons. The definition thus excludes any extension of