GOJRA, Aug 4 Almas Hameed grabbed his seven-year-old daughter and stumbled out of their smoke-filled home as she pleaded in vain to bring her pet parrots. His wife, father and two other children did not survive.

Outside, hundreds of enraged Muslims called the victims “dogs” as they fired guns and burned house after house in the Christian neighbourhood of this town. The weekend rampage left at least seven Christians dead. All but one were relatives of Hameed.

“We always live in fear,” said Hameed, 50. “I wonder if I will see a time in this country when I can live like an equal citizen.”

The attack, which Pakistani officials said was incited by a radical Islamist group, followed rumours that some Christians had desecrated the holy Quran.

“It was like hell. Nobody was coming to help us,” said Atique Masih, a 23-year-old Christian who was shot in his right leg.

Christians — Protestants and Catholics among them — make up less than five per cent of Pakistan's 175 million people, according to the CIA World Factbook. They generally live in peace with their Muslim neighbours.

Extremists, however, have made Christians and other minority religious groups a target. Earlier this summer in the Kasur area, for instance, Muslims set fire to dozens of Christian homes, according to local news accounts.

The anti-Christian riots began on Thursday and reached their peak on Saturday, when Hameed's home was torched.

Officials said the carnage was spearheaded by members of the banned extremist group Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan, which more frequently targets Shias.

Minority Rights Group International, a watchdog organisation, ranked Pakistan last year as the world's top country for major increases in threats to minorities from 2007 — along with Sri Lanka, which was engaged in a civil war. The group lists Pakistan as seventh on the list of 10 most dangerous countries for minorities, after Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar and Congo.

In Gojra, Hafiz Mohammad Shahbaz, a prayer leader at a mosque, said police briefly detained a Christian in the holy Quran defilement case but later set him free. That caused concern among the Muslim community, he said.

Shahbaz alleged that a peaceful rally of Muslims to protest the incident was passing by the Christian neighbourhood on Saturday when the Christians fired shots at its participants. “That triggered the violence,” he said, calling the killing that ensued un-Islamic.

Hameed, however, said mosque prayer leaders on Saturday stirred the pot by calling for every Christian to be killed. Christians repeatedly sought police help but to no avail, he said. Many local residents said they were in shock over the violence.

“We really regret these killings. I can assure that no one from this city could ever think of killing non-Muslims,” said Mohammad Naseer, a grocer who has lived in Gojra for 47 years and insisted the attackers must have been outsiders.

Hameed said his daughter, Aashi, was being treated for burns in the hospital. In the courtyard of their gutted home lay two wooden-made bird cages. The parrots were gone.—AP