The notorious ISI’s draconian measures to suppress and punish journalists for supporting former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his political party have come out in the open with the sordid tale of how a prominent Pakistani journalist, Imran Riaz Khan, was abducted, tortured, drugged and humiliated for over five months last year.
The abduction came close to the May 9 civilian mutiny following the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. In October 2022, ISI was suspected to be behind the killing of a well-known TV broadcaster, Arshad Sharif, in Kenya. A 592-page report by the Pakistani Federal Investigation Agency had termed the killing to be a “planned targeted assassination,” claiming that Kenyan police were “used as instruments.”
The details of Imran Riaz Khan’s ordeal were revealed by a Youtuber journalist, based in New York, few days back.
Imran Riaz Khan, a former TV news presenter with more than three million followers on YouTube, was stopped at Sialkot airport in May last while he was on his way to Oman.An avid supporter of Imran Khan, he was leaving the country so that he can speak freely, he told a journalist. He was then taken to the local police station before being transferred to ISI’s Lahore Sectoral headquarters, nicknamed chidiyaghar or zoo for its secret cells where prisoners were locked up and tortured. Many never see the light of the day.
The disappearance of Imran Riaz Khan shocked the media fraternity. Newspapers and magazines, besides social media platforms, highlighted his disappearance and sought his release. At one point, a foreign media outlet feared he was killed. Everyone knew who detained the journalist.
At the Lahore ISI sectoral headquarters, two sets of interrogators were set upon Imran Riaz Khan. One group, from the Lahore ISI unit, brutally assaulted him, punching him on his face, head and stomach for days. The second group came from another ISI office who played soft, asking the journalist to do their bidding–write and create videos accusing Imran Khan and his colleagues of corruption and other misdeeds. Imran Riaz Khan was hardly fed and only had accessed to a copy of Quran. Despite constant beatings and threats to him and his family, he refused to cooperate.
Soon after he was taken to the Counter-Terrorism Headquarters in Rawalpindi where he was locked up in a cell tinier than the kennel of his dog in his Sialkot home. The cell had no windows,no air vents,no light and the tiny washroom was outside. He was given you his copy of Quran but he had no sense of day and night and prayed by guessing time. Here too, he was beaten up daily. He was not stripped but his eyes were covered, his hands and legs tied before being beaten by thick planks on his shoulders, legs and other parts of his body. The assaulters made sure that the beatings did not leave any serious marks onhis body. The second team worked on him, trying to persuade him to write or create videos against the former Prime Minister. He refused all along.
Then the ISI changed its tactics. The journalist was fed with a cocktail of drugs every day. The beatings continued daily, as relentlessly as ever. After a few weeks, he was injected with another cocktail of drugs. His body began to show the results within days. His body began to shiver constantly. He would often fall unconscious. He lost over 25 kgs of weight but his spirit remained unbroken.
After few weeks, the daily ordeal of drugs and beatings began to take its toll. He once, in frustration, smashed his head against the wall, injuring himself. He was prepared to do anything. He reportedly promised to deliver what the ISI wanted. But his outputs were not found enough poisonous and he was beaten again.
The ISI now began to fear that Imran Riaz Khan would either die of his beatings and drugs or go insane. He was quietly released, ending another sordid story of how ISI treats its own citizens.