Islamabad: The Pakistan correspondent of an Indian TV channel was forcibly piled into a car by “10-12 armed men” and beaten up before he managed to jump off the speeding car on a busy motorway. Taha Siddiqui, who is the Pakistan bureau chief of WION (World Is One), had been receiving insistent messages from Pakistan’s Fedeal Investigation Agency’s counter-terror wing since May 2017 to appear before it for his comments on social media against the military.
Islamabad Police ordered a probe into the “kidnapping attempt” following a complaint by Siddiqui. Journalist Asad Hashim, who accompanied Siddiqui to the police station, tweeted that Siddiqui was “beaten (and) threatened with death”. “He (Siddiqui) only escaped by running through oncoming traffic,” Hashim said in another tweet.
Later, Siddiqui posted a message via Dawn journalist Cyril Almeida’s Twitter account, recalling the details of the kidnapping attempt. “I was on my way to airport when 10-12 armed men stopped my cab, forcibly tried to abduct me.” He further said that he had managed to escape the kidnapping attempt and that he was “safe and with the police now”. “Looking for support in any way possible,” Siddiqui added, ending his tweet with the hashtag #Stop-EnforcedDisappearances.
Siddiqui had filed a petition in the Islamabad high court alleging harassment by FIA over the phone. Siddiqui had alleged that a man named Noman Bodla, who identified himself as member of FIA’s counter-terrorism department, had called him and attempted to pressure him into appearing for an ‘interrogation’ at the FIA headquarters. He had expressed his reluctance to appear before the FIA to the HC by citing instances wherein scribes who had appeared before it had either been detained illegally or had disappeared.
Some of Pakistan’s leading journalists expressed strong protest against the attack on Siddiqui. Hamid Mir of Geo TV wrote: “Journalist community must condemn the kidnapping attempt of Taha Siddiqui with full unity... no compromise on harassment of media.”
