Matiullah Jan reached home safely hours after reportedly being ‘abducted’ from Islamabad’s Sector G-6 on Tuesday, according to his family.
The people who took the journalist in the morning left him near Fatehjang late on Tuesday, according to media reports, which also confirmed that he is safe and sound.
Earlier in the day, speaking to a private TV channel, Jan’s wife said that his car was found parked outside a school in Sector G-6 of the capital with one of his mobile phones inside the vehicle. Jan, a freelancer who has worked for numerous local and foreign media outlets, was due to appear in the Supreme Court this week after it took suo motu notice of an alleged contemptuous tweet by the journalist.
“There were more than five people – some in civilian clothes, others in black uniforms – who forcibly picked up my husband,” Kaneez Sughra told AFP in a phone interview. Security footage captured by the school where Sughra teaches showed several men force Jan into a sedan outside the main gate.
The footage showed Jan toss a mobile phone over the school fence, only for a school security guard to hand it back to a man in uniform.
An Islamabad police spokesman said officers had begun gathering information in the case. Sughra said her husband had been followed by unknown men in recent weeks. In 2017, an unidentified assailant threw a brick at his car.
As the news of his disappearance drew the attention of journalists and international rights bodies, a tweet was posted on Matiullah Jan’s account at 3:17pm – purportedly by his son – which read, “Matiullahjan, my father, has been abducted from the heart of the capital [Islamabad]. I demand he be found and the agencies behind it immediately be held responsible. God keep him safe.”
Meanwhile, Information Minister Shibli Faraz also confirmed the journalist’s abduction during a post-cabinet meeting presser later in the evening. “This much is established that he [Jan] has been kidnapped,” said Faraz. “We will try to find out where he is and how he can be recovered. This is the responsibility of the government and it will fulfil it,” he added.
Terming the development as ‘unacceptable’, Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Accountability Shahzad Akbar said he had spoken with the Islamabad police chief and instructed him to take ‘immediate action for retrieval and registration of FIR’.
Earlier in the day, CCTV footages purportedly showing his alleged abduction surfaced on social media, which showed several armed men exiting at least three vehicles. The footages were shared by several journalists on social media, however, police have yet to comment on their veracity.
Meanwhile, officials from the Aabpara Police Station reached the site and said they were trying to acquire the CCTV footage. SHO Shaukat Mehmood said that the journalist’s wife has not yet filed an application to lodge a report on his disappearance.
