After repeated death threats, journalist Misri Khan was shot dead Tuesday by unidentified gunmen outside his office in Hangu, in the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. No one claimed the killing but his son thought a religious group could have been involved. Khan was the correspondent of the dailies Mashriq and Ausaf and ran a newspaper distribution agency.
Khan’s 25-year-old son, Umer Farooq Orakzai, told Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF), “I think my father was killed because of what he wrote, since we have no enemies.” Khan, 50, had told colleagues he had received threats which he assumed to have come from “religious sects.” His agency’s office had also been set on fire. Khan reported the threats to the police and gave them the numbers from which the calls were made.
Khan had been distributing newspapers in Hangu district for 30 years, while working as the correspondent for several Pakistani dailies. Fellow journalists in Hangu were stunned by the news of his death and announced three days of mourning. Located to the south of Peshawar (the provincial capital) and near the Orakzai Tribal Area, Hangu district has been experiencing violence for years because of the presence of various extremist religious sects and, more recently, the arrival of the Taliban.
“The killing of Misri Khan must not be allowed to become just another statistic. There is already a long list of journalists whose deaths have gone unexplained,” New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said. “If Khan died because of his work, it will make him the sixth journalist or media worker to be killed for his journalism this year in Pakistan—a mounting death toll the government must address.”
RSF has irged the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa authorities to carry out a thorough investigation in order to identify and punish those responsible. The inability of the federal authorities to bring the perpetrators and instigators of the murders of journalists to justice encourages them to continue. As a result, Pakistan is now the world’s most dangerous country for media personnel.
Nine journalists and media workers have been killed in the course of their work in Pakistan since the start of the year, including three since the start of this month.
