ISLAMABAD: Pakistani journalist and popular anchorman Arshad Sharif, mysteriously killed in Kenya last week, will be laid to rest in Islamabad today, Thursday, a day after his body arrived in Islamabad from the East African nation.
Kenyan police said Sharif was killed Sunday night when the car he was in sped up and drove through a checkpoint outside the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, prompting police to open fire at his vehicle. The shooting was being treated as a case of mistaken identity, senior police officials have said.
A hugely popular talk show host, Sharif was of late a harsh critic of the current ruling coalition and the army, and fled the country in August, citing threats to his life. He was also widely considered a staunch supporter of ex-PM Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) opposition party. At the time he left Pakistan, he was facing a slew of court cases related to charges of sedition and others. He was believed to have been in the United Arab Emirates since he left Pakistan and had recently traveled to Kenya from the Emirates.
The Pakistan government on Wednesday announced it was sending a two-member team to Kenya to “ascertain the facts” surrounding Sharif’s murder. His body arrived in Pakistan in the wee hours of Wednesday. A postmortem was completed that evening.
“His funeral prayers will be offered at the Shah Faisal Mosque Islamabad at 2pm on Thursday,” the family said. “He will be laid to rest at the H-11 cemetery in the federal capital.”
Sharif left Pakistan in August after going into hiding in his own country in July to avoid arrest following a citizen’s complaint against him on allegations of maligning the country’s national institutions, a reference to the military. His whereabouts were not publicly known.
A month later, Sharif’s employer, the private ARY Television, fired him, saying he had violated the TV station’s social media policy. His talk show Power Play was discontinued.
The TV channel had earlier in the year remained critical of Pakistan’s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif following the ouster of his predecessor, Imran Khan, in a no-confidence vote in parliament in April. Khan says he was ousted as part of a US plot, a charge both Washington and the Pakistani government deny. Sharif the journalist, who is not related to the PM, had been a prominent critic of Khan’s ouster.
Khan on Tuesday told a gathering of lawyers in the city of Peshawar that he had asked the slain journalist to leave the country as his life was in danger in Pakistan. He paid glowing tribute to Sharif, saying he was among those journalists who never bowed to pressure.
