‘New evidence’ surfaces in Saleem’s murder

According to a story appearing in the latest issue of The New Yorker, an American intelligence official has claimed that a senior Pakistani official allegedly speaking for Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani had ordered the killing of Asia Times Online journalist Saleem Shahzad.
However, Inter-Services Public Relations Director General Athar Abbas called the allegation “preposterous”. According to the report authored by Dexter Filkins, Shahzad angered Pakistani authorities by writing about al Qaeda infiltrating the Pakistan Navy at a particularly sensitive time in Pakistan, as the country’s leaders reeled from the humiliation of the Osama bin Laden raid.
“The initial directive was not to kill him but to rough him up,” Filkins reports, but, according to an American official, a senior Pakistani officer speaking for Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Kayani later ordered Shahzad killed. Filkins says the Inter-Services Intelligence and the military may have targeted Shahzad not only because of his incendiary articles but also because they suspected he was a foreign spy. The report says that shortly before his death, Shahzad had been in touch with several foreign intelligence officials as part of his reporting and had been recruited by British and Indian intelligence agencies. Filkins also hones in on the fact that a US drone strike killed Ilyas Kashmiri, a top al Qaeda leader and a subject and source in Shahzad’s articles, in Pakistan’s tribal region only four days after Shahzad’s body was discovered. “Given the brief time that passed between Shahzad’s death and Kashmiri’s, a question inevitably arose. Did the Americans find Kashmiri on their own?” Filkins asks. “Or did they benefit from information obtained by the ISI during its detention of Shahzad? If so, Shahzad’s death would be not just a terrible example of Pakistani state brutality, it would be a terrible example of the collateral damage sustained in America’s war on terror.” Filkins adds that Shahzad’s cell phone records revealed more than 258 calls in one month to and from a single number that may have been Kashmiri’s.