On 1 August 1996, three unidentified men -- one armed with a pistol -- abducted Ashraf Shaban, the editor-in-chief of the Urdu-language daily "Al-Safa", from the newspaper's offices in Srinagar, Kashmir, and forced him into an auto-rickshaw taxi. Shaban has not been seen since and no one has claimed responsibility for his abduction.
Shaban, who assumed the editorship of "Al-Safa" following his father's assassination, has frequently been intimidated by both militant separatists and government security forces. In September 1995, Border Security Forces (BSF) troops detained and interrogated Shaban for nine hours, accusing him of meeting with militants on a regular basis. And in late 1994, the separatist group Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen sealed the offices of "Al-Safa" for two months after the newspaper published a government announcement of electoral roll revisions. Shaban's father, Mohammad Shaban Vakil, the previous editor-in-chief of "Al-Safa", was shot dead by masked gunmen in his Srinagar office on 23 April 1991, a case that remains unsolved.
Shaban's kidnapping is the second such incident involving a Kashmiri journalist in less than a month. On 8 July, the Jammu and Kashmir Ikhwan -- a pro-India militia -- kidnapped 19 journalists and threatened to kill six of them unless the editors of Srinagar's major Urdu-language dailies presented themselves before the militia's leader. All nineteen were released unharmed later the same day, following the intervention of the Rashtriya Rifles commando unit (see IFEX alert dated 9 July 1996).
