The authorities don’t believe his story, but authorities in Pakistan generally side with Muslims against Christians.

As for the forced conversion, the Qur’an famously says that “there is no compulsion in religion,” (2:256), but what constitutes “compulsion” is in the eye of the beholder. The institutionalized subjugation of the dhimma, with its regular humiliation and harassment, from which one can be freed for the simple price of converting to Islam, is not considered compulsion. Remember Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, the journalists who were kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam — even though their conversions were obviously coerced, their captors made them say that they were converting freely, and the captors probably believed that themselves. After all, the journos could have chosen to be killed instead. Likewise Aqeel Masih could have chosen freely to keep his arms and convert to Islam. Instead, he chose freely to remain a Christian and lose his arms.

“Lahore: man had arms chopped off ‘after refusing to convert to Islam,'” by James Macintyre, Christian Today, July 14, 2016: