Islamabad: It has now become amply clear that Ahmed Farhad, a prominent poet and journalist of Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir or POJK, has been abducted by Pakistan’s notorious intelligence agency ISI.
The clarity came during proceedings in a court of law in Islamabad today after Farhad’s wife Ain Naqvi approached it with a plea for intervention for the safe release of her husband.
Talking to the media later, Ain Naqvi said during the court proceedings it became clear that Farhad had been picked up by ISI.
She said the Judge gave a hint in this direction and sought a report from ISI and Ministry of Defence on next Monday.
She said the judge also questioned why only journalists and social activists who speak against the government in Pakistan are picked up and detained in this manner.
ISI, the Inter-Services Intelligence, is habitual of carrying out such abductions against those critical of the military and such actions are described as Enforced Disappearances.
Farhad, originally hailing from Bagh in POJK, was abducted from his house in Rawalpindi near national capital Islamabad, two days back.
According to his wife, several men in dark coloured uniform, usually worn by the Pakistani army commandos, barged into their house and dragged Farhad out to be taken away in a vehicle.
Before leaving, they broke the CCTV camera and destroyed the recording system, Ain Naqvi said.
Farhad has been speaking against the Pakistani military.
Incidentally, his poem highlighting the notorious and dreaded practice of the Pakistani secret agencies to illegally pick up people had gone viral.
Finally, he himself became a victim of the same practice of the Pakistani state agencies.
According to Ain Naqvi, her husband Farhad had been receiving threats from the State agencies for the last two years but the final trigger appeared to be his vigorous coverage of the recent unrest in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir and the brutality unleashed by the Pakistani forces on the Kashmiri protestors.
Significantly, Farhad is not the first journalist to be a victim of Enforced Disappearance or extra-judicial killing in Pakistan.
In one such case earlier, a leading investigative journalist Arshad Sharif was got assassinated by the Pakistani agencies in far-off Kenya over a year back.
The incident related to Farhad has triggered an outcry in Pakistan.
Pakistan’s opposition party – Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf – has said, “Abductions, enforced disappearances and custodial torture of journalists and social media activists at the hands of intelligence agencies, has become a norm in the country, post regime change operation.”
Despite the critical comments and outcry, it is highly unlikely that such incidents will stop in Pakistan as long as its military remains so powerful to control everything.
