of most of the Christians from the area following the furore surrounding the arrest of Rimsha last month. With passions running high in the community -- hundreds of people demonstrated outside her house, reportedly demanding the right to burn the young girl to death -- most Christians fled the area. "We are not upset the Christians have left and we will be pleased if they don't come back," Chishti told the Guardian on 18 August. Tahir Naveed Chaudhry from the All Pakistan Minority Committee said Rimsha's lawyers had always maintained the evidence was planted. "And now it is proved that the whole story was only designed to dislocate the Christian people," he said. "[Chishti] must be prosecuted under the blasphemy law as it will set a precedent against anyone else who tries to misuse that law." The blasphemy laws have been widely abused as a powerful way to settle scores and disputes. People have been sentenced to long jail terms on extremely weak evidence, some of which cannot even be properly examined in court for fear of repeating any blasphemy. But public criticism of the laws is itself dangerous -- two prominent politicians have been assassinated by religious hardliners after speaking out. Mumtaz Qadri, a former security guard who last year gunned down his boss, Salman Taseer, the governor of the Punjab at the time, is regarded by many Pakistanis as a hero for killing a man who had publicly criticised the blasphemy laws and backed a Christian woman who