Posts Tagged ‘Pakistan’
June 28th, 2012
The Karachi offices of
Pakistani television station Aaj news and English-language daily Business Recorder
were attacked on 25 June. Four men reportedly attacked the offices, opening fire inside of the building and injuring two employees. A spokesman for the militant Islamic group Tehrik-e-Taliban
claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that it was out of the group’s anger that they did not receive as much coverage from the station as the government and the army.
May 31st, 2012
A local TV correspondent
has been murdered in
Pakistan, while another has had his house attacked. Abdul Qadir Hajizai, a correspondent for a Balochi-language TV channel WASH TV, was shot by men on motorcycles on 27 May as he headed home from work. The journalist later died in hospital. Separatist group Baloch Liberation United Front (BLUF) have taken responsibility for the murder, claiming Hajizai was a government informer reporting against them. In a separate attack, armed men also shot at the home of Irshad Akhtar, president of Turbat Press Club. He and his family were unhurt.
May 22nd, 2012
The
body of a
Pakistani journalist has been found, one day after he was abducted. Razzaq Gul, a reporter with the Express News in southern Balochistan, was found dumped near his home in Turbat on Saturday, having been shot 15 times. On Sunday, journalists in Quetta
gathered to protest the murder. According to the Balochistan Union of Journalists (BUJ), Gul was the 21st journalist to die in the area. Pakistan Press International claims six journalists have been deliberately targeted and murdered in Balochistan in the last four years.
May 21st, 2012
Pakistani authorities have
restored access to micro-blogging platform Twitter, after temporarily blocking it because of messages deemed “offensive to Islam”. The ban, which came into force on Sunday (20 May) shortly after Interior Minister Rehman Malik said there were no plans to block Twitter, seemed to be the result of a competition on Facebook to submit images of the Prophet Muhammad. The ban was lifted about eight hours after it was imposed, and the chairman of The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) Twitter was blocked after it
refused to remove inflammatory and blasphemous content.
May 17th, 2012
Three journalists have been
beaten by police officers in northwest
Pakistan. Sher Ali Khan from TV station News One, Siraj Ali of Geo News, and Shabir Ahmed from Pakhtunkhuwa News daily were targeted by police officers while trying to cover a demonstration in the Charsadda district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhuwa province. As police attempted to disperse protesters with batons, the journalists began filming the clash. Police then turned on them, beating them and snatching their cameras in an attempt to destroy their footage. All three of the reporters sustained injuries from the attack, with Khan being admitted to hospital.
May 15th, 2012
The
dead body of a kidnapped
Pakistani journalist was discovered in Karachi last week. Tariq Kamal was kidnapped on 6 May, along with his friend Fawad Sheikh, who was also murdered. Kamal was visiting a dangerous area of Balochistan for an exclusive report when he was kidnapped. The journalist’s family received a call from him informing them he was going to be killed by his captors. His kidnappers
later contacted his family to inform them that Kamal and Sheikh were killed because they were police informants.
April 10th, 2012
Index on Censorship joins a global coalition of NGO’s to call for the withdrawal of censorship plans in Pakistan
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March 26th, 2012
Censorship in Pakistan has ranged from the ridiculous to the downright terrifying. But as the country entered a new phase in 1983, Salman Rushdie hoped for change
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