The killing of a colleague: 'I will never forget the anguished cry when I told Anita a body had been found near her husband's car'
THE NEWS filtered through around midnight on Sunday. Syed Saleem Shahzad, a Pakistani journalist I first met five years ago, had disappeared. It was the middle of the night in Pakistan, so I waited until morning to call Saleem’s wife, Anita, whom I had got to know when he was abducted in southern Afghanistan in late 2006.Correspondent MARY FITZGERALD received an e-mail from Saleem Shahzad, a Pakistani journalist and friend, claiming his life was in danger. He was killed a few days ago. Who did it, and why?
Then, his Taliban captors accused him of spying, so Anita and I, with several of Saleem’s colleagues, worked feverishly to establish his journalistic credentials and secure his release.
What Anita told me on Monday morning sent a chill down my spine. Saleem, a father of three young children, had vanished after leaving the family home in Islamabad to participate in a political talk show on a Pakistani TV channel. His short drive to the studio would have cut through some of the city’s most affluent and secure neighbourhoods. Messages from interlocutors led Saleem’s family and Ali Dayan Hasan, the Human Rights Watch representative in Pakistan, to believe he had been picked up by the ISI, the country’s much-feared intelligence agency. Relatives received anonymous reassurances that he would soon be released.
It was not to be. On Tuesday Saleem’s abandoned car, wristwatch and identity card were found about two hours’ drive from Islamabad.
Between battling poor phone lines as I tried to reach Saleem’s friends and relatives in Islamabad, I scoured Twitter for updates from Pakistan. There, I learned that a body had been discovered in a canal several kilometres from his car. I finally got through to Anita, not knowing that her brother had gone to identify the remains without telling her a corpse had been found.
I will never forget the long, anguished cry that echoed down the phone from Islamabad when I told Anita an unidentified body had been found near her husband’s white Toyota. Nor the numbing shock when what we all so greatly feared was confirmed soon after.
Details of the horrific manner of Saleem’s death came later. Doctors said the corpse bore at least 15 injury marks. Several of his ribs had been broken, his lungs punctured, his liver damaged and his face battered.
“He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone,” Anita repeated between sobs when we spoke just after Saleem’s burial, in his hometown of Karachi, on Wednesday. “I must be strong for the children’s sake. I am a single mother now. What is done is done.”
Saleem, who wrote for the Hong Kong-based Asia Times and Le Monde Diplomatique , knew he was in danger. His beat, which included probing the machinations of Pakistan’s security apparatus as well as dissecting the mass of militant groups operating in the region, was one where many others feared to tread. He cultivated contacts within Pakistan’s military and its intelligence services as well as the country’s dense thicket of jihadi factions. He would swap his usual open-necked shirt and slacks for a baggy salwar kameez, the traditional, pyjama-like ensemble worn by men in south Asia, for forays into the tribal badlands straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he secured interviews with senior Taliban and al-Qaeda figures.
Saleem’s fearless, some might say foolhardy, reporting on those who inhabit the murky nexus between militant groups and Pakistan’s security services earned him several scoops, and his dispatches were widely read.
“His work reporting on terrorism and intelligence issues in Pakistan brought to light the troubles extremism poses to Pakistan’s stability,” US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said, in a statement calling for a full investigation into his death.
But his often-controversial reports brought him no little enmity and more than a few death threats. Saleem, author of a forthcoming book on al-Qaeda and the Taliban, thrived on the risky nature of his work, even courted it, but in recent months family and friends had grown increasingly concerned for his safety.
IN OCTOBER I received an e-mail from Saleem that he had also sent to his editor at Asia Times , Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch and Hameed Haroon, a friend and the president of the All Pakistan Newspapers Society. He requested that we keep the e-mail, which detailed a meeting he had just had with ISI officials, “as a record if something happens to me in the future”.
Saleem had been summoned to ISI headquarters after he wrote an article in which he alleged Pakistan had released Mullah Baradar, a senior figure in the Afghan Taliban, who had been arrested that spring.
He was told by ISI officials that the “story had caused a lot of embarrassment for the country”, and they wanted a retraction. Saleem said it had been leaked to him by “an intelligence channel”, meaning an ISI agent, and was confirmed by credible Taliban sources. The ISI officials demanded to know the source of the leak, saying, “It is a shame that such a story is leaked from our organisation.”
Saleem refused to disclose the name of his source. At the end of the meeting, one ISI official said something Saleem interpreted as a threat. He informed Saleem that the ISI had recently arrested a militant who had a lot of material in his possession, including a hit list. “If I find your name on the list,” Saleem’s e-mail quotes the ISI official as saying, “I will certainly let you know.”
The ISI issued a rare statement after Saleem’s body was found, denying any role in his killing. But the October encounter, which was followed by several anonymous threatening phone calls, and the circumstances of Saleem’s abduction, in a high-security area dotted with checkpoints, have led many in Pakistan to form their own conclusions. “Any journalist here who doesn’t believe that it’s our intelligence agencies?” the BBC journalist and novelist Mohammed Hanif wrote on Twitter. Some have speculated that his death may have been unintentional, the result of torture that went too far.
“Saleem Shahzad was repeatedly threatened by the ISI, and he feared that he would be abducted and/or killed by the ISI. We believe that that fear was credible,” says Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch. “The manner of his abduction, torture and killing is reminiscent of several other cases documented by Human Rights Watch and other organisations that have pointed to the complicity or involvement of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, including the ISI.”
Saleem disappeared two days after writing an article for Asia Times that suggested a militant strike on a naval base in Karachi last month had been carried out in response to efforts to root out al-Qaeda cells that had infiltrated the lower ranks of Pakistan’s navy. He also claimed the attack followed failed negotiations between the navy and al-Qaeda about the release of naval officers detained on suspicion of terrorist links. On Monday, several Pakistani media outlets reported that a former navy commando had been arrested in connection with the attack, which had resulted in the deaths of 10 people.
Saleem’s story was explosive, coming soon after the killing of Osama bin Laden. There is no doubt it would have infuriated those already needled by awkward questions raised by the fact that the al-Qaeda leader had lived close to a Pakistani military academy for years.
“His last story seems to have dealt a fatal blow to him,” says Umar Cheema, an investigative journalist who last year was picked up by suspected intelligence agents in Islamabad and beaten for six hours. “But his reports in the past also irked the military establishment. Saleem’s new book on al-Qaeda and the Taliban could have been another reason. He had told a friend that after the book was published the intelligence services wouldn’t let him live peacefully in Pakistan.”
In an article published in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper this week, Saleem’s friend and colleague Abbas Nasir wrote: “This wasn’t a journalist who’d merely irritated the spooks or someone like that. This was a person who’d be seen as someone who knew too much. His investigative reports on the [naval base] attack are not the only example.”
Those who share Saleem’s increasingly perilous beat fear that his torture and killing may have been meant as a warning in a country already considered one of the most dangerous for journalists to work in.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says 11 media workers were killed in Pakistan in 2010, most of them in militant attacks, and at least five have died this year. Others have been abducted or suffered beatings or threats from the security services or militant groups.
“The message being sent out from Saleem’s death is devastating,” says Cheema. “That message is whoever will follow in his footsteps will be punished like him.”
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