WASHINGTON, April 20: Credit card companies are cancelling cards issued to legal Muslim residents in the United States because of their religious affiliations, says a report published in a New York magazine.

Most of the victims are from Pakistan. The monthly City Limits gives several examples including that of Farooq Firdous, a Pakistani and his Indian Muslim wife, Yasim Khan. Both are legal residents. Both have been paying off their credits on time. And yet both had their cards cancelled.

The report says that their card company asked them to send “a mountain of paperwork, which included three years of tax returns, six months of bank statements and a job verification letter.” They were given 15 days to comply. Since it was a verbal order, the couple asked for written instructions. Instead they received letters saying their credit card had been cancelled.

The monthly has found 12 cases in which Muslims, nearly all Pakistani-Americans, with good credit, all of whom claim they made no unusual or exorbitant charges or late payments, had their credit cards cancelled.

The magazine found no cases of non-Muslims’ credit cards being cancelled outright, or even non-Muslims who were asked to send in paperwork for existing accounts. The report says that for Pakistani proprietors of small businesses, maintaining access to credit and other financial services is a matter of survival.

Mr Firdous conducted his own informal survey and discovered that representatives of the card-issuer bank had contacted at least five more of his friends and acquaintances, requesting information for their existing accounts with the bank.

All of the friends’ cards were then cancelled, whether they sent in the paperwork or not. All are Muslim, while none of his Jewish or Chinese friends received the dreaded call.