ISLAMABAD: Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a Paris-based international organization for media freedom, on Tuesday called on Pakistan to immediately release journalist Fawad Shah, who was deported from Malaysia in August 2022, despite having refugee status.
Shah fled Pakistan in 2011 after being “abducted and tortured” by members of the premier Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), according to the RSF. Pakistan’s counter-espionage agencies “had been trying to have him repatriated” ever since the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) granted him refugee status in Malaysia in 2014.
The RSF said Shah disappeared after being sent back to Pakistan last August, but the “Where is Syed Fawad Ali Shah?” appeal issued by the organization in January bore fruit when he was officially transferred to Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail on February 8. However, it added, the journalist was moved from there to Peshawar ten days later.
“Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for the immediate and unconditional release of Syed Fawad Ali Shah, a Pakistani journalist also known as Fawad Shah, who was deported from Malaysia last August despite having refugee status there, and who is now being held in a prison in Peshawar, in northern Pakistan, on unsubstantiated charges,” the media rights watchdog said in a statement on Tuesday.
“It has emerged that, before his transfer to Adiala Jail, Shah spent five and a half months held incommunicado in one of the cells of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), a counter-espionage agency attached to the interior ministry.”
The RSF said it had seen a copy of the January 2020 police report that accused Shah of posting “false, frivolous and fake information” online in violation of sections 20 and 24 of the 2016 Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA). The police report also accused the journalist of “defamation” and “intimidation” of officials, it added.
The watchdog said it received no response when it asked the interior minister’s office to provide more information about the accusations against Shah and about the conditions in which he was being held.
Pakistani authorities allowed Shah’s wife, who wished not to be named, to visit him at a Peshawar prison on February 21, the RSF said.
“He has become very weak and his whole body was shaking,” Shah’s wife was quoted as saying by the watchdog. “Seeing his condition, he has been tortured a lot. His mental state is very bad.”
In recent years, the RSF said, it had seen a disturbing surge in incidents targeting Pakistani journalists based abroad.
“The many cases of journalists being subjected to intimidation, abduction and torture is one of the main reasons why Pakistan is now ranked 157th out of 180 countries in RSF’s World Press Freedom Index,” it added.
