Missing social media activist returns home after a year

KARACHI: Missing social media activist and the head of Civil Progressive Alliance Pakistan (CPAP) Samar Abbas returned home after a year on March 6.

According to sources, unidentified persons left a blindfolded Abbas near Sohrab Goth. Samar Abbas, a resident of the Gulshan-e-Iqbal area in Karachi, was visiting Islamabad when he disappeared on January 7, 2017.

Ramna police had subsequently also registered a case of kidnapping over Abbas’s disappearance on January 15, but officials had remained tight-lipped over the matter.

A Karachi native, Abbas reportedly went missing under mysterious circumstances on January 7, when a wave of disappearances of social media activists hit Pakistan with Waqas Goraya and Asim Saeed disappearing from Lahore on January 4, Salman Haider vanishing from Islamabad on January 6 while Ahmed Raza Naseer went missing from Sheikhupura on January 7, the same year.

While, Goraya, Saeed, Naseer and Haider were only ‘missing’ for a few days as they all returned home safely on January 28, 2017, Abbas had remained missing for more than a year.