KARACHI: An anti-terrorism court in Karachi on Wednesday sent Nasrullah Khan Chaudhry, a senior journalist and member of Karachi Press Club (KPC), to jail for five days.
The court also directed the Investigation Officer (IO), Syed Ali Haider of the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD), to conduct the inquiry as per law in the case pertaining to alleged recovery of anti-state and hate literature from the accused.
The CTD officials produced the journalist after the completion of two-day remand, handcuffed and his face covered with a cloth.
However, the journalist community protested outside the court premises on presenting a senior journalist in such a way
President Karachi Press Club (KPC) Ahmed Khan Malik said he wants to inform the court about the facts and stated that some plainclothes of law enforcement agencies had conducted a raid on KPC and harassed journalists present in the club.
Malik said that Nasrullah Khan was taken away after the raid on KPC and a fake case pertaining to recovery of hate literature was registered against him. ‘’ Is this a crime, if a journalist reads literature?”
Journalist, Nasrullah was taken away by unknown armed men from his home in Soldier Bazar a few days back. On November 8, a group of armed plainclothes forcibly entered into the premises of Karachi Press Club (KPC) and started making video recordings of different parts of the premises.
The journalist community, after the raid on KPC, staged a sit-in outside the governor house and demanded the arrest of the KPC intruders.
Meanwhile, the CTD has said that the raid carried out at the KPC last week was indeed conducted to arrest Chaudhry, who was present there at that time but managed to flee from the scene.
The law enforcers apologised from the journalist community for raiding the press club, saying the operations were being carried out to protect the citizens of Karachi from any untoward incident, specifically in wake of the defence expo which is scheduled to be held later this month.
It is pertinent to mention that adviser to Sindh chief minister on information Murtaza Wahab had on Friday claimed that the intrusion of law enforcers in plainclothes into KPC on Thursday night was due to some “misunderstanding”.
In a statement, the adviser said that initial inquiry into the incident revealed that the law enforcers went there due to “some problem in their GSM locator”.
