The killing of Syed Saleem Shahzad is brutal confirmation that Pakistan is the world's most hazardous place for journalists. According to the United States-based Committee to Protect Journalists, in the nine years since the abduction and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, 32 media professionals have met a violent end, 17 of them in targeted attacks for clear work-related motives. International pressure on Pakistan forced the pace in the investigation of the Pearl case in 2002. But in none of the other murders has anyone been brought to book. It was in this atmosphere of impunity that Shahzad went missing from a well-secured neighbourhood of Islamabad. Two days later, his body, bearing torture marks, surfaced 150 km away. In any conflict, the main threat to journalists is from armed actors, state and non-state. The situation in Pakistan is all the more dangerous given the blurred lines, and linkages, between the two. If the Inter-Services Intelligence is being seen as Suspect No. 1 in this case, it is not without reason. Eight months ago, the journalist who wrote about al-Qaeda and Taliban was summoned to the ISI headquarters for an interview — after he reported that Pakistan had released the Afghan Taliban commander Mullah Baradar, arrested earlier in 2010, to take part in talks. Shahzad notified friends about that meeting, detailing it in an email that he wanted publicised if anything untoward happened to him; he also confided that he had received death threats from ISI officials thrice in the last five years. It is significant that he went missing days after he reported that the Mehran Base attack was carried out in retaliation for a Pakistan Navy crackdown on al-Qaeda sympathisers in its ranks. There have been suggestions that Shahzad, the author of a new book on al-Qaeda, knew details of the Pakistani network that supported Osama bin Laden while he sheltered in Abbottabad.
Pakistan's news media naturally see the Shahzad killing as an unambiguous attempt to intimidate them and silence dissent. The May 1 stealth attack by the U.S. to eliminate bin Laden, and the Mehran attack in which the Navy was savaged by home-grown terrorists, have seen the media shed their usual reluctance to challenge the military and the ISI. It should be natural for an investigation into Shahzad's killing to start with the ISI officials who interviewed him in October 2010. The Pakistani media community must insist on this in order to fix accountability for the journalist's killing. Else the enquiry ordered by Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani will go the way of other such investigations, and the impunity will continue unchecked.
Keywords: Syed Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan journalist killing, Pakistan news media, ISI, al-Qaeda, Taliban
As long as the terrorists and the Government of Pakisthan(ISI) hobnob and have hand in glove with each other, there is no security for common man, journalists, writers, artists and who not all including the politicians who oppose the nasty honeymoon.
Every time a ghastly story comes out from Pakistan (there are too few anyway), it reminds us that Pakistan still remains a threat to India's security. It is sad that in today's "economic warfare" age, a nation is still not willing to purge its evil and progress forward that would contribute to its prosperity.
I had the fortune of meeting Mr. Abdul Kalam, the visionary who took sessions in my University years before. His viewpoints still remain valid - "protect India by equipping it with arsenal".
Because of personal interests, right now, US is still not willing to touch Pakistan, but down the line, I foresee that the common interests will be superceded by terrorist actions and the nation will be brought to its knees like it was done for Iraq.
Pakistan is notoriously ebullient. The Pak cities have earned a bad name for violence and lawlessness. Perhaps, their fanatic reverence to religion in its sectarian import can be suspected as the reason. They have a phobia for transparency or openness and they try to put a veil on every thing they like of love. Such a mindset may have paved the way for the brutal murder of the innocent journalist, Saleem Shahzad. The budding journalist's tragic end is blot on Pakistan. And all right thinking people have condemned the abduction and silencing of the media man. The abduction lays bare the fact that the abductors might have some nexus with the insiders. It is beyond the pale of possibility sans a betrayal.
It is sad to note that the neighbor is sliding forever into the labyrinth of destruction and becoming a pariah of the international community. It is a question of time before the world stars treating Pakistanis like it would treat Palestinians in 1980's. It is all the more important for India to have a stable and less polarized Pakistan and it would be of great help media could act responsibly without having to exaggerate everything that Pakistan does.
According to my opnioin Pakistan is not safe journalists. In the Pakistan many terrorists groups are working and they don't want to display the secret information to the people and if any journlist do that thing then they will take actions against journlist. There is law for safety of journlist but Pakistan is not obeying the law. So I think countries have to make pressure on the Pakistan , not only Pakistan but all the nations which are not obeying the law to obey the ruls strictly and take the actions against culprits.
The dastardly murder of journalist Shahzad is clearly,as the media in Pakistan believes, an attempt by the notorious ISI to intimidate journalists from reporting anything that might reveal to the rest the world the complicity of the country's military in terrorist activities carried out by radical Islamic groups worldwide. We already know from the testimony given by double agent David Headley in a trial in Chicago that the ISI was responsible for the Mumbai attacks carried out by the LeT.
The international community must declare the ISI as a terroist organizaton and extert pressure on the Pakistan military to allow democracy to function in that state and stop the use of terrorism for its purposes. Also, cases should be filed in the International Court of Justice against current and former heads and other senior officials of the ISI and the Pakistan military for sponsoring terrorism and human rights violations.
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