Musa Khan....A sinless Victim

Pakistan’s shocked and saddened media community came out across the country on Thursday to protest the killing of Musa Khankhel, the Swat correspondent for Geo Television and The News.

 he 28-year-old Musa Khan was abducted by unidentified men while he was reporting on the controversial new effort to bring peace in the Taliban-overrun district of the North-West Frontier Province. His body was later found riddled with a dozen bullets.

According to his brother, also a journalist working in Swat, Musa Khan was picked up at gunpoint as he accompanied a “peace caravan” headed by Maulana Sufi Mohammed, the leader of the Tehreek-e-Nifas-e-Sharia-Mohammadi.

 he NWFP government had earlier in the week concluded an agreement with the TNSM for the imposition of Sharia courts in seven districts of the province, including Swat.

In return, Sufi Mohammed must persuade the Swat Taliban, headed by his son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah, to submit themselves to government rule.

The two were reported to be in negotiations at a secret location on Thursday in Swat but the killing of a journalist has cast a shadow over the Pakistani media’s enthusiasm for the deal.

 usa Khan was among the large number of journalists covering the TNSM leader’s march across Swat. He filed his last dispatch for Geo only hours before his body was discovered.

In the capital, a large number of journalists gathered to protest Musa Khan’s killing, demanding that the perpetrators be arrested, and pledged not to be silenced by this incident. His killing was the fourth of a journalist in Swat in one year. “Musa Khan, you have not shed your blood in vain,” the journalists chanted. “Musa Khan we salute your courage.”

The journalist had received several threats in the recent past, which he had reported to his organisation, the Jang media group. Pakistani journalists said it was impossible to say who might have killed him — the Taliban or, as one report in The News suggested, the security agencies. A proliferation of different Taliban groups in Swat, with militants owing allegiance to a local commander, complicates the picture.

“In Swat, and in many other places in NWFP, there are more grey areas than black and white, and this is the problem. In fact, this is Pakistan’s problem,” said Imtiaz Gul, a senior journalist.

Also on Wednesday, armed men walked into a press club building in Wana in the militant-stronghold of South Waziristan, asked the guards to leave, and then blew up the building, destroying it with explosives they planted as they arrived. No one was hurt or killed in the incident.

And in Lahore, the secretary-general of the South Asia Free Media Association, Imtiaz Alam, who has urged the Pakistan government to conduct a transparent probe into the Mumbai attacks, was attacked by motorcycle-borne men as he drove home at night. The bearded young men smashed the windows of his car, but he escaped without injuries to his person.

 Mazhar-Abbas, secretary-general of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists, said the government had so far not solved a single case of attack on a journalist, except one in the Sindh province, in which the PPP government arrested a former minister and a political opponent.

The tragic killing of Musa Khel has also sparked a debate on the employer’s responsibilities towards training and providing insurance for those working in hostile situations.