A journalist was “forcibly” taken away by unknown persons from his house in the Pakistan’s national capital early Wednesday, his family claimed in a petition filed before the Islamabad High Court (IHC) for his recovery.
Waheed Murad was associated with the Urdu News website and previously worked at News One TV and Ausaf newspaper.
His mother-in-law Abida Nawaz told the Urdu News that unknown persons knocked at the door around 2.00 am and said that they were from police and checking if any Afghan national was living in the house.
“They broke the door to enter when Waheed refused to open it and took him away,” she claimed.
Separately, Abida in a petition filed in the IHC for his recovery claimed that the journalist had raised his voice about the recent alleged disappearance of two brothers of a US-based journalist Ahmad Noorani.
She claimed that Waheed was “forcibly disappeared from his Sector G-8, Islamabad…by unknown officials presumably belonging to intelligence agencies, and accompanied by persons in black uniforms and two police double cabin vehicles.”
She described herself as an “eyewitness to the enforced disappearance, and was also herself manhandled by the abductors who also took away her phone”.
Making the defence ministry, the Islamabad police chief and the Karachi Company police’s station house officer respondents, she urged the IHC to “immediately trace and produce” the journalist.
The alleged disappearance comes a week after two brothers of Noorani allegedly “disappeared” from their Islamabad home. A petition has been filed in the IHC for their recovery.
So far, the police or the government have not responded to the disappearance.
