Pakistani reporter who alleged Al Qaeda links in naval base attack found dead
Pakistani naval soldiers and relatives carry the coffin of lieutenant Yasir Abbas who was killed during an attack by insurgents on Pakistan’s Mehran naval air base in Karachi, during his funeral ceremony in Lahore on May 24, 2011. A siege on a major naval base in the heart of Pakistan’s biggest city that took 17 hours to quell heaps humiliation on a military still reeling from the fallout over Osama bin Laden, experts say. Up to six Taliban fighters, armed with rocket-propelled grenades, explosives and automatic rifles, crept under cover of darkness to place ladders against the walls of the Mehran base and climbed over barbed wire into the facility late on May 22.
A courageous Pakistani investigative reporter was found dead in a car left near a canal about 60 miles from Islamabad, according to various reports. Missing for two days prior to the discovery of his body, Asia Times Online correspondent Syed Saleem Shahzad had written in a recent report about the May 22 attack on a naval base in Karachi that he believed operatives from Al Qaeda had infiltrated the Pakistani navy.
Police said there were signs of torture on the body of the reporter, according to Reuters, and Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan representative for Human Rights Watch, said Shahzad had told him that he was under threat by Pakistan's military intelligence agency.
"We can't say for sure who has killed Saleem Shahzad," the news agency quoted Hasan as saying. "But what we can say for sure is that Saleem Shahzad was under serious threat from the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) and Human Rights watch has every reason to believe that that threat was credible."
“We urge the Pakistani president and prime minister to firmly condemn this murder and to do everything possible to ensure that those responsible are identified and brought to justice without delay,” Reporters Without Borders said in a press release.
"When a Pakistani journalist – not a foreigner – writes that al-Qaeda is infiltrated deep inside the military establishment, the mission's on," Asia Times Online colleague Pepe Escobar wrote in a heartfelt tribute. "You abduct, torture and snuff him. Assassination, low-tech, is how they finally got Saleem. And "they" had to be the Inter-Services Intelligence – as he knew, and told us, all along."
The suspicious death coincides, appropriately, with the publication of the latest report from the Committee to Protect Journalists, which says that the killing of 251 reporters in 13 countries have been killed "with impunity" over the past decade.
The group singles out Iraq, Somalia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka as the worst environments for journalists, the BBC reported. But by the numbers, Pakistan belongs in the same company. Though 92 reporters were killed in Iraq and 56 killed in the Philippines, Pakistan's 14 journalist deaths place it in a worse position than Somalia, with 10 deaths, or Sri Lanka, with 9.
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