Junaid Ali, a young man in his early 20s who sent shock waves across the country on Wednesday by claiming that he was an eyewitness to the planning of the deadly attack on PNS Mehran that had taken place at the residence of an army officer in Rawalpindi, retracted his statement a day later, saying he only wanted to implicate the person he blamed for purely “personal reasons”.
“My aim was to punish the military officer who is the brother of my girlfriend and is unwilling to give her hand in marriage to me,” Junaid admitted to Pakistan Today when asked whether he was aware of the repercussions of his actions. Junaid had appeared on Wednesday in the Geo News talk show “Capital Talk”, hosted by Hamid Mir, without his face appearing on the screen and claimed that the army officer planned the PNS Mehran attack at his residence and he was also planning another assault on an American airline’s plane at Islamabad airport. Junaid said whatever he had said and done was without a doubt thoughtless and juvenile, but it raised serious questions about the judgement of one of Pakistan’s most renowned TV anchors and journalists. He said Mir should not have interviewed him and let him hurl such serious accusations against an officer of the armed forces without cross-checking the facts.
Mir, however, said he did talk to a senior police official in Islamabad after recording Junaid’s statement, who advised him to contact the security establishment. “I then asked the the agencies whether there was any substance in the story told by the boy, to which they said yes, and that they had also taken some people in custody following interrogation of the boy and it was only after that that we let his interview go on the air,” said Mir.
Mir said the young man had run pell-mell to his office on the day journalist Salim Shahzad was murdered and told the security guard that he was being chased by some people who wanted to kill him and that he wanted to see Hamid Mir.
