Ex-PM Khan’s party accuses state agencies of ‘abducting’ media team member ahead of Islamabad rally

ISLAMABAD: Former prime minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party criticized the state on Friday for “abducting” a senior member of its media team ahead of a planned public rally on the outskirts of Islamabad, accusing it of focusing more on quelling dissenting voices than on dealing with the problem of militant violence in the country.
PTI leaders have frequently complained of being targeted by intelligence agencies since the fall of its administration in a parliamentary no-confidence vote against Khan.
However, it began to face a major crackdown last year in May after violent protests followed the former premier’s brief detention on corruption charges, with people carrying PTI flags vandalizing government buildings and military properties in different parts of the country.
In the most recent development, the party said one of the members of its media department, Rizwan Ahmad, had been illegally taken away by the state agencies.
“Rizwan Ahmad, Senior member PTI Media Department has been abducted by agencies a short while ago,” Omar Ayub, a top PTI leader, said in social media post. “This action by the agencies is just to silence his voice.”
“The agencies are not doing their job of countering terrorism and the latest assassination of Senator Hidayat Ullah Khan is an example, but they are busy silencing the voices of PTI that dare to speak the truth,” he added, referring to killing of a Pakistani lawmaker in the northwestern Bajaur district in a blast that killed four others.
PTI has complained of Ahmad’s disappearance only a few days after its announcement to hold a protest demonstration in Islamabad on June 6 against new taxes imposed in the recent federal budget amid rising cost of living in Pakistan.
Only a day earlier, Amnesty International condemned such incidents against PTI workers and their family members, pointing out that they had been “forcibly disappeared since June 2024.”
“Two brothers of PTI member Azhar Mashwani, Professors Mazhar-ul-Hassan and Zahoor-ul-Hassan, and Shahbaz Gill’s brother, Ghulam Shabbir, were disappeared on 6 June and 9 June respectively,” it said. “The whereabouts of all three individuals remain unknown.”