Press pause: Silence in the air as PTI’s DJ picked up

Party official say DJ Butt arrested with 30 other loyalists

ISLAMABAD:

All of the Junoon music on DJ Butt’s playlist might soon be replaced by Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues. Muhammad Asif aka DJ Butt, an entertainer whose beats punctuated political rhetoric at the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) sit-in in Islamabad, has allegedly been arrested by law enforcers on charges of abetment.

Some sources claimed that he was arrested on charges of carrying narcotics. A party spokesperson said 100 party workers, including DJ Butt, have been picked up since Friday.

Butt, who has been working with PTI since 2010, was reportedly arrested from a guest house located near PTI’s secretariat on Embassy Road, party officials said. However, others say he was picked up on Friday while he stepped out to get some food.

A PTI spokesperson Chaudhry Rizwan said around 10 people wearing police uniforms picked up DJ Butt at roughly 7 am. He could not be traced till the filing of this report. “We have two witnesses to the arrest,” Rizwan claimed.

The spokesperson said all police stations in the city have been checked, but PTI workers were given the same response: the missing party workers are not here. Rizwan said the party has not reported DJ Butt’s absence to the police as some party members say lodging a ‘missing person’ report does not make sense in this case.

Sources say Butt was arrested with 30 PTI workers from Melody Food Park in Aabpara at 12.30 am on Thursday night. They said the party workers were arrested for creating commotion.

An official at Aabpara Police Station said he is unaware of any such arrests. “We don’t know who has arrested him. I’m fed up of answering the same question since morning,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 13^th, 2014.