Missing Pak scribe found after 2 years

Lahore, October 21

A Pakistani woman journalist who was allegedly kidnapped while pursuing the case of an Indian engineer two years ago has been rescued, officials said.

Zeenat Shahzadi, a 26-year-old reporter of Daily Nai Khaber and Metro News TV channel, went missing on August 19, 2015, when some unidentified men allegedly kidnapped her while she was en route to her office in an auto-rickshaw from her home in a populated locality of Lahore.

Shahzadi was believed to have ‘forcibly disappeared’ while working on the case of Indian citizen Hamid Ansari, before her abduction. Ansari went missing within the country in November 2012.

Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (CIED) president Justice (retired) Javed Iqbal said last evening that Shahzadi had been rescued from an area on the Pakistan- Afghanistan border on Thursday night.

“Non-state actors and anti-state agencies had abducted her and she has been rescued from their custody,” Iqbal said, adding that tribals from Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provinces had played a key role in her recovery.

Unable to withstand the loss, Shahzadi’s brother Saddam Hussain committed suicide in March last year, making her disappearance the focus of headlines again.

Ansari, a Mumbai resident, was arrested in 2012 for illegally entering Pakistan from Afghanistan reportedly to meet a girl he had befriended online. — PTI