The gruesome killing of Khalil Jibran in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s (KP) Landi Kotal area last month was the seventh case of a journalist murdered in Pakistan this year. A former president of the local press club and a veteran journalist, Jibran’s vehicle was ambushed while he was returning home with friends after dinner. The gunmen dragged him out of his vehicle and unleashed a hail of bullets, killing him on the spot.

The month before was worse — one of the deadliest for Pakistani journalists — with four fatalities, evenly spread over Pakistan’s four provinces. May’s first murder took place on the third, which ironically is World Press Freedom Day. Siddique Mengal, another veteran journalist and the president of the Khuzdar Press Club, died after his vehicle was targeted with a ‘homemade magnet bomb’.

Less than a fortnight later, on May 15, Ashfaq Ahmed Sial was gunned down in Muzaffargarh in southern Punjab. On May 21, digital journalist Kamran Dawar was shot dead in a village in Miranshah, KP. On the same day, Nasrullah Gadani — who was also very active on social media — was shot multiple times in Ghotki’s Mirpur Mathelo area in northern Sindh. He would succumb to his injuries in Karachi three days later.

Before that, in March, another journalist Saghir Ahmed Lar was gunned down in Punjab’s Khanpur city. Like many others, he also had a significant social media presence. A few days earlier, a body mutilated with stab wounds and acid burns was found in Punjab’s Gujjar Khan, which was later identified as that of print journalist Tahira Nosheen Rana.

This is separate from the threats, attacks, abductions and other forms of intimidation faced by media practitioners in this country.

This has been the deadliest year for Pakistani media in a decade, with seven journalists murdered in the first six months. But with compromised investigations and poor conviction rates being the norm, including in the cases of journalists, the likelihood of the victims’ families receiving justice is slim…

In the cases of murder, each instance was followed by swift calls for justice from local and international press freedom entities and followed by protests of varying intensity.

The journalists in Khyber have been protesting non-stop to get justice for their colleague, Khalil Jibran. Similarly, protests are taking place in Sindh against the murder of Nasrullah Gadani.

The rest of the protests have seemingly petered out, which is not surprising for many, considering the high levels of impunity in the country. Pakistan dropped two places this year and now ranks 152 out of 180 countries in the 2024 World Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders.

According to Islamabad-based press freedom entity, the Freedom Network, 53 journalists were killed because of their work between 2012-2022. The report claims that only two of those cases ended in a conviction.

However, even in those cases, the convictions were later overturned, including in the 2013 murder of Karak journalist Ayub Khattak, who was murdered due to his reporting on drug-related activities.

ESTABLISHING MOTIVE

For press freedom entities, the biggest challenge in such cases is to establish whether the victim was killed because of their work. It becomes increasingly difficult in cases where the journalists are working in smaller towns — as is the case in most recent fatalities — due to a multitude of factors.

Unless working for one of the bigger media houses, journalists in smaller towns are not paid a salary, and most have a separate form of employment or business. Several journalists in small towns across Pakistan told Eos that they had paid either a one-time fee or continue to make an annual payment to their employing organisation in order to retain their ‘journalistic’ card.........

© Dawn (Magazines)