Mr. Mussa, 46, is staring at the prospect of a death sentence.
Mr. Mussa was arrested after a television station in Kabul broadcast images that it claimed showed Westerners baptizing Afghans and other Afghans praying at private Christian meetings. The broadcast stoked fears of proselytizing brought on by the influx of foreigners since the American-led invasion in 2001. Some lawmakers publicly declared that converts should die.
Since his arrest, Mr. Mussa said, guards at one jail slapped him and beat him with sticks. At another, two prisoners who learned of the charges against him assaulted and raped him, urged on by Taliban inmates.
“The Taliban were saying, ‘He is an infidel, he is filthy and he needs to be killed,’ ” he recalled.
Mr. Mussa has not seen his wife and six children in months, since they fled to Pakistan for their safety. He is not even sure if he has a lawyer; he signed agreements with two, then never saw them again….
An ethnic Hazara, a minority group long oppressed in Afghanistan, Mr. Mussa grew up a Shiite Muslim in the central highlands around Bamian Province. He lost his leg to a land mine as a young man serving in the army of the Soviet-backed government. For the last 16 years before his arrest, he worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross, helping amputees get fitted with artificial limbs.
He became intrigued by Christianity, he said, when a jet bombed a neighbor’s home in Kabul where he lived during the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal. The home’s owner, an impoverished porter with eight children, was at the market when the bomb hit, killing seven of his family members. But not long after, two foreign women drove up and helped dig through the rubble amid gunfire from factional forces.
“When I saw these women and their compassion for my people, it affected me,” he said. “I asked people who they were and they said they are the followers of Jesus Christ.”
In time he found another Afghan Christian in his neighborhood who gave him a copy of the New Testament, and later baptized him.
He now spends his days at Kabul Detention Center, living in a corridor among a handful of other prisoners. He signed an agreement late last year with a foreign lawyer but then never saw him again. Unbeknownst to Mr. Mussa, a judge barred the lawyer, a South African, from representing or seeing Mr. Mussa.
A second lawyer visited last month, Mr. Mussa said. But to him the lawyer seemed more like a prosecutor, asking him who converted him, who prayed with him and if he believed the Koran was the complete book of God.
“If you go back to Islam, I can help you,” Mr. Mussa recalled the lawyer, Mohammad Mostafa, saying.
Mr. Mostafa, who declined interview requests, works for the Legal Aid Organization of Afghanistan, which said he still represented Mr. Mussa. His boss, Mohammad Afzal Nooristani, said defense lawyers — a profession barely a few years old here — were loath to take apostasy cases, fearing reprisals from the authorities and the public.
Well, they always have the inspiring example of those brave lawyers in neighbouring Pakistan…
Mick Hartley 
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