Islamabad - The family of a tribal journalist in Pakistan who disappeared in December said they fear he is in the custody of US forces.
A brother of Hayatullah Khan has been meeting with military officials posted in the North Waziristan tribal region and the highest political officials in the North-Western Frontier Province (NWFP) who told him they could not help him find his brother because Khan was not in Pakistan.
'A very senior government official in NWFP told me that he is not here, which lead us to believe that he has been handed over to the United States,' Ihsanullah Khan, 20, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa Thursday.
A high-level military official also told Ihsanullah Khan that his brother had probably been handed over to the American forces.
Hayatullah Khan - who works for an Urdu-language newspaper and the European Pressphoto Agency, a sister agency to Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa - went missing after he photographed what he claimed was a piece of an American missile that reportedly killed senior al-Qaeda leader Hamza Rabia on December 1 in Miran Shah, Waziristan's regional headquarters.
Pakistan's military authorities said Rabia was killed in a bombmaking incident.
While the government continued to deny any knowledge about Hayatullah Khan's whereabouts, his family and colleagues said they believe Pakistani authorities picked him up because he contradicted their version of Rabia's death.
Ihsanullah Khan has also spoken to the New York-based media rights group Committee to Protect Journalist, which has asked both the United States and the Pakistani governments to provide information about the missing journalist.
'In this swirl of rumour and disinformation, all parties must make it clear whether they are holding Hayatullah or have information about where he is,' the group's executive director, Ann Cooper, said in a statement.
