Government has to Take on Military and Intelligence Services and end Impunity

(New York) – The Pakistani government should redouble efforts to find the killers of the journalist Saleem Shahzad, following the failure of the judicial inquiry commission to identify those responsible, Human Rights Watch said today. The commission concluded in its January 10, 2012 report to the government that the police failed to question Pakistan’s military intelligence officials in its criminal investigation.

Shahzad, a reporter for the Hong Kong-based Asia Times Online and for Adnkronos International, the Italian news agency, disappeared from central Islamabad on the evening of May 29, 2011. His body, bearing visible signs of torture, was discovered on May 31, near Mandi Bahauddin, 130 kilometers southeast of the capital. The circumstances of the abduction raised concerns that the military’s feared Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency was responsible. In June 2011, the Supreme Court, at the request of the government, instituted a commission of inquiry into the killing.

“The commission’s failure to get to the bottom of the Shahzad killing illustrates the ability of the ISI to remain beyond the reach of Pakistan’s criminal justice system,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The government still has the responsibility to identify those responsible for Shahzad’s death and hold them accountable, no matter where the evidence leads.”

The ISI has a long and well-documented history of abductions, torture, and extrajudicial killings of critics of the military and others. Those abducted are routinely beaten and threatened, their relatives told not to worry or complain as release was imminent, and then released with the threat of further abuse if the ordeal is made public. Pakistani and international human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, have extensively documented the ISI’s intimidation, torture, enforced disappearances, and killings, including of many journalists.

The five-member commission, which included two judges, two senior police officers, and one journalist, convened on June 21, 2011. Over six months it interviewed 41 witnesses, including Shahzad’s family members, journalists, senior ISI officials, and others. It also conducted an extensive examination of documents, including relevant emails, telephone records, and investigation reports, as well as reports by previous similar commissions.

Among those interviewed were Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch and Hameed Haroon, president of the All Pakistan Newspaper Society (APNS) and publisher of the Dawn Group. Each had received emails from Shahzad in 2010 complaining of threats by ISI agents for his reporting on links between the ISI and al-Qaeda. On October 19, 2010, Shahzad sent an email to Human Rights Watch outlining his meeting with the ISI and asking for the email to be released “in case something happens to me or my family in future.” Shahzad sent the same email and information about other threats to Haroon, and to colleagues at Asia Times Online.

ISI officials maintained to the commission that Shahzad had cordial relations with them until shortly before his killing. Despite strong indications of ISI involvement, the commission concluded that the Pakistani state, militant groups including the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and unnamed ‘foreign actors’ could all have had a motive to kill Shahzad on the basis of his writings.

“The commission appeared fearful of confronting the ISI over Shahzad’s death,” said Adams. “Shahzad had made it clear to Human Rights Watch that should he be killed, the ISI should be considered the principal suspect. He had not indicated he was afraid of being killed by militant groups or anybody else.”

Human Rights Watch said that the investigation’s weakness was exemplified by the failure to interview another journalist, Umar Cheema, who was abducted, tortured, and then dumped 120 kilometers from his residence in Islamabad in September 2010. Cheema alleged that his abductors were from Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. It is inexplicable that the commission failed to seek Cheema’s testimony despite his very public allegations against the ISI and repeated offers to testify before the commission, Human Rights Watch said.

“At great personal risk, scores of journalists, human rights activists, and others presented themselves before the commission to offer accounts of ISI and military involvement in human rights abuses,” Adams said. “The commission repaid this courage by muddying the waters and suggesting that just about anyone could have killed Shahzad.”

The commission’s recommendation that all intelligence agencies should be made accountable through “parliamentary oversight” and judicial redress should be promptly implemented by the government through appropriate legislation, Human Rights Watch said. The commission also recommended that “the balance between secrecy and accountability in the conduct of intelligence gathering be appropriately re-adjusted” and a “statutory framework carefully outlining their respective mandates and role” be developed. It also urged that the intelligence agencies’ “interaction with the media be carefully institutionally streamlined and regularly documented.”

“ISI abuses will only stop if it is subject to the rule of law, civilian oversight, and public accountability,” Adams said. “It is the government’s duty to insist on such accountability and the military’s duty to submit to it. The ISI needs to stop acting as a state within a state.”

Human Rights Watch expressed grave concern that the commission found it appropriate to recommend that the “press be made more law-abiding and accountable through the strengthening of institutions mandated by law to deal with legitimate grievances against it.

“It is perverse to use an investigation into the killing of a journalist as a way of limiting press freedom,” said Adams.

Pakistan remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists. At least 10 journalists, including Shahzad, were killed in 2011. In January 2011, a Geo TV reporter, Wali Khan Babar, was fatally shot in Karachi shortly after covering gang violence in the city. In May, the president of the Tribal Union of Journalists, Nasrullah Khan Afridi, was killed when his car blew up in Peshawar; the provincial information minister described the act as a “targeted killing by the Taliban.”

In August, two men on a motorcycle shot to death an Online News Agency reporter, Munir Ahmed Shakir, after he covered a demonstration by Baloch nationalists in the Khuzdar district of Balochistan. In November, the body of Javed Naseer Rind, a sub-editor with the Urdu-language Daily Tawar, was found with torture marks and gunshot wounds in Khuzdar town. On January 17, 2012, Mukarram Khan Atif, a reporter for the Voice of America, was killed by the Taliban in the Charsadda district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Brig. Gen. Zahid Mehmood of the ISI told the commission that the ISI/ISPR (Inter Services Public Relations) and other agencies “should stop patronising and protecting ‘favorite’ journalists.” Government payoffs to journalists not only distorts the news reaching the public, but the withdrawal of such patronage and “protection” can result in threats and violence, said journalists who spoke to the commission.

Human Rights Watch called on the government to pass legislation to prohibit the country’s security and intelligence agencies to end the practice of the ISI and other agencies planting agents in media organizations or providing secret payments to journalists to write or not write stories.

“Journalists are under attack from all directions in Pakistan, including by the military,” said Adams. “This murderous free-for-all will only end when the government can protect journalists from militants and its own intelligence agencies. Arresting the killers is the best way to do that.”

Source: Human Rights Watch

The following article by Farrukh Khan Pitafi appeared in the The Express Tribune, describes the so called judicial commission’s failure to get to the bottom of the Shahzad murder and to question Pakistan’s military intelligence officials and to identify the perpetrators.

Did no one kill Saleem Shahzad then?

James Jesus Angleton, former chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) counter-intelligence staff was credited with coining the term ‘wilderness of mirrors’, for the world of espionage. Paranoid as he often was, he also strongly believed that the Soviet spy agency, KGB was capable of influencing CIA’s perceptions without leaving behind a trace. Upon reading the report presented by the Saleem Shahzad Murder Inquiry Commission, one feels lost in the very wilderness. However, in our wilderness, traces of manipulation are visible.

Instead of an impartial inquiry, one might have expected the report presents the image of a witch-hunt and indulges in voodoo magic to preserve the soul of Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency. The Commission was primarily tasked to identify the perpetrators of the crime and shed light on circumstances leading to it. It ostensibly fails to deliver on both counts as it manages to raise more questions than answering the existing ones.

The singular most striking aspect that becomes evident from even a casual reading of the report is the Commission’s cynicism towards journalists and the Human Rights Watch (HRW), which was remarkably in contrast with its gullible attitude towards the intelligence community and its visible lackeys, pretending to be journalists. While it seemed that the inquiry was expecting the journalist community to present nothing short of a smoking gun, two of the three major intelligence agencies were let go upon producing written statements.

Even in the ISI’s case, only Rear Admiral Adnan Nazir was cross-examined at length, and that, too, to the effect that a case is built almost in his favour. And while Mr Ali Dayan of HRW was subjected to rather gratuitous questions about his organisation and work, redoubtable testimonies of self-proclaimed journalists like like Zafar Mehmood, Sheikh Qamarul Munir alias Qamar Yousafzai and Muhammad Raashed were accepted at face value without going into details of their professional competence. This apparently is because the testimony of these gentlemen supported the ISI’s narrative apart from casting aspersions on Shahzad’s person.

Shahzad’s book, Inside al Qaeda and Taliban (Pluto Press, 2011), has raised serious concerns on the failure of counter-intelligence. When he claimed that Ilyas Kashmiri had influenced some serving and retired officials in the armed forces, did it not become essential to probe whether such al Qaeda moles could have killed him to maintain their cover.

Another glaring omission in the structure and functioning of the Commission was the absence of a dedicated forensic expert and an investigator. In the absence of either, the Commission could expect to be stalled and that is precisely why it had to crack open Shahzad’s email account on its own. Quite astoundingly, it does not make much of the fact that the authorities did not provide much cooperation.

Also, it makes one wonder that the Commission quite clearly did not consider, even remotely, the possibility that the victim’s family might have contradicted Ali Dayan’s version under duress or because of it may have received actual threats. People who recovered the body or had something to do with the discovery were either not probed in detail, or else the account was not worthy of a mention in the report.

The fact remains that Pakistan has a long history of such crimes. Please remember the names of Daniel Pearl, Wali Babar, Moosa Khan Khel, Hayatullah Khan, Umar Cheema and Faraz Hashmi. No conspiracy theory about the seemingly ubiquitous ‘foreign hand’ can hide this fact.

In the end, the Commission does at least one generous thing — that of recommending the release of the three million rupees pledged to the family of the victim. But it should have gone a bit further and recommended that the family of the victim should be shifted abroad as this state and its justice system cannot ensure security for the life and property of journalists.

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