Four social media activists with outspoken, secular and anti-military views have gone missing in Pakistan in recent days, sparking fears of a crackdown on left-wing dissenters.
Pakistan’s intelligence agencies have a history of illegal detentions and of not notifying relatives about where they are or why they are being held. However, such “forced disappearances” are usually directed against those suspected of involvement in terrorism or violent separatism.
One of the four men, Asim Saeed, was abducted from his home in Lahore on Friday after he had returned from working in Singapore. Ahmad Waqas Goraya, another online activist who is usually based in the Netherlands, was detained on the same day, his friends said.
Photo: AP
According to a statement given by Saeed’s father to the police, four men arrived at the house in a pickup truck and “forcefully took him away.”
“I made all efforts to locate my son, but I have been unable to trace him,” his statement said.
At the time of Saeed’s abduction, the information technology worker was carrying his laptop and two mobile phones.
Both Saeed and Goraya help run the Mochi Facebook page critical of Pakistan’s powerful military. The page recently criticized the army’s heavy-handed crackdown on political groups in Karachi, and accused senior officers of corruption and the military of interfering in national politics.
Salman Haider, a lecturer at Fatima Jinnah Women University, failed to come home on Friday. His wife received a mysterious message from his phone saying he was abandoning his car on the Islamabad-Rawalpindi motorway. The car was later recovered by police.
On Saturday, Pakistani Minister of the Interior Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said he had urged police to find Haider, a playwright, poet and editor of Tanqeed. The online magazine has criticized army counterinsurgency operations in the southern state of Balochistan.
Relatives of the fourth man, Ahmed Raza Naseer, said he was taken from his family’s shop in the Punjab District of Sheikhupra on Saturday.
Human Rights Watch asked authorities to investigate the apparent abductions as a matter of urgency.
“The Pakistani government has an immediate obligation to locate the four missing human rights activists and act to ensure their safety,” said Brad Adams, the group’s Asia director. “The nature of these apparent abductions puts the ... government on notice that it can either be part of the solution or it will be held responsible for its role in the problem.”
Shahzad Ahmad, director of Bytes for All, a human rights group focused on online security, said the disappearances had spooked social media activists, and several had deactivated their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
“We are concerned over the recent roundup of social media activists, which we see as a threat to freedom of expression, association and assembly in online spaces,” he said.
The combined effect of the monsoon, the outer rim of Typhoon Fengshen and a low-pressure system is expected to bring significant rainfall this week to various parts of the nation, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The heaviest rain is expected to occur today and tomorrow, with torrential rain expected in Keelung’s north coast, Yilan and the mountainous regions of Taipei and New Taipei City, the CWA said. Rivers could rise rapidly, and residents should stay away from riverbanks and avoid going to the mountains or engaging in water activities, it said. Scattered showers are expected today in central and
People can preregister to receive their NT$10,000 (US$325) cash distributed from the central government on Nov. 5 after President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday signed the Special Budget for Strengthening Economic, Social and National Security Resilience, the Executive Yuan told a news conference last night. The special budget, passed by the Legislative Yuan on Friday last week with a cash handout budget of NT$236 billion, was officially submitted to the Executive Yuan and the Presidential Office yesterday afternoon. People can register through the official Web site at https://10000.gov.tw to have the funds deposited into their bank accounts, withdraw the funds at automated teller
COOPERATION: Taiwan is aligning closely with US strategic objectives on various matters, including China’s rare earths restrictions, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Taiwan could deal with China’s tightened export controls on rare earth metals by turning to “urban mining,” a researcher said yesterday. Rare earth metals, which are used in semiconductors and other electronic components, could be recovered from industrial or electronic waste to reduce reliance on imports, National Cheng Kung University Department of Resources Engineering professor Lee Cheng-han (李政翰) said. Despite their name, rare earth elements are not actually rare — their abundance in the Earth’s crust is relatively high, but they are dispersed, making extraction and refining energy-intensive and environmentally damaging, he said, adding that many countries have opted to
PEACE AND STABILITY: Maintaining the cross-strait ‘status quo’ has long been the government’s position, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Taiwan is committed to maintaining the cross-strait “status quo” and seeks no escalation of tensions, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday, rebutting a Time magazine opinion piece that described President William Lai (賴清德) as a “reckless leader.” The article, titled “The US Must Beware of Taiwan’s Reckless Leader,” was written by Lyle Goldstein, director of the Asia Program at the Washington-based Defense Priorities think tank. Goldstein wrote that Taiwan is “the world’s most dangerous flashpoint” amid ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He said that the situation in the Taiwan Strait has become less stable
RSS