Stories we were most proud of in 2015
DESIGN: AAMIR KHAN
Looking back, covering the Peshawar school attack on December 16, 2014 was the most harrowing newsroom experience. Editors and reporters in Pakistan are somewhat desensitized to casualties due to the high number of terrorist attacks in the country but when the death toll started creeping up that day at the Army Public School, we all knew that it wasn’t just any terrorist attack.
One of our reporters in Peshawar lost his cousin in the attack, but he didn’t stop working. There wasn’t a dry eye in the newsroom as we tried to report on the attack and provide viewers a comprehensive and responsible coverage of the devastating attack. It was overwhelming.
So, we knew we wanted to cover the one year anniversary of the attack to honour the victims and to also give an overview of what happened since in terms of government policy. We wanted to cover it extensively without overwhelming our readers. It was important to create an online memorial for all 147 victims of the attack, to revisit the events of the day and to review the government’s progress since the attacks and whether the state stepped up to its promises of taking action.
It would be impossible to name all those who took part in this project and made it possible. From videos, to editing, to reporting, everyone who participated did an exemplary job. And after weeks of sleepless nights, we were proud of our online memorial for the Peshawar attack -- which became a personal responsibility rather than just a professional one.
Shayan Naveed
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No story on water in Karachi is complete without the reporter contracting gastroenteritis. Mercifully, a tablet of Ciproxin revived me enough from the effects of the fecal-matter laced well water at Future Morr to start writing Aqua Final. I titled it ‘The end of water’ because we all know the story may have been on the water crisis of summer 2015 but this news is not going to go away. My headline reflected my state of mind: I believe no story is done until you feel the Pain. This one took two months but those two months felt like a lifetime of pain because the subject was so vast and the terrain so shaky.
For example, the data of crackdowns on illegal hydrants was impossible to scrape because it was so disorganized. But it revealed a small truth, which I feel was the triumph of the story: given to the Supreme Court was data of FIRs registered for water theft in Baldia. A line of inquiry that emerged after our mapping revealed that Baldia's people had no choice but to steal from the mains because the KWSB hadn’t laid a network of pipelines to actually distribute water to their neighbourhoods and homes.
The breadth of the subject — water in Karachi — was daunting enough to take on. But I learnt something else on this assignment: Ferya Ilyas and Khurram Siddiqui joined the effort and reminded me that I didn’t always have to chew everything that I bit off.
But most of all, perhaps it is stories like these that speak of the editors who dream them up. Tribune Editor Kamal Siddiqi told me find out why we had a shortage of water. Just go ask the questions, he told me as I wept and wailed at his desk that I couldn’t possibly do such a big story. Just go ask.
The answers do find you, I discovered.
Mahim Maher
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What does one say to the wife of Karachi’s most notorious target killer, who was to be sent to the gallows in a few days?
Does the reporter sympathise, while asking questions? What does one ask a murderer’s wife? Or, does the reporter simply focus on the woman who is happened to be married to a convicted murderer?
I decided to do the latter.
Four days before Saulat was to be hanged on March 19 this year, when his execution was first stayed, I met his wife and sisters outside Karachi Press Club.
They were protesting and demanding a reinvestigation in the murder of former KESC MD Shahid Hamid, for which Saulat was given the capital punishment. They claimed he was falsely implicated.
As the protest and slogan chanting wrapped after half an hour, Saulat’s wife and I walked towards her Alto. She removed her veil to reveal a tired face, bushy eyebrows and wrinkles already forming on a woman yet to turn 40.
She refused to be called by her name, preferring Mrs Saulat instead.
This was the first time in 18 years she stepped into the limelight. No one knew who this woman was prior to that.
Mrs Saulat seemed both desperate and determined. She was madly in love with her husband. Having knowing him since they were children, she would still blush like a young girl every time she spoke of him.
Her narration of Saulat’s proposal to her on the slope of a small hill in North Nazimabad was out of a movie it seemed. She had trunk-loads of letters that she had written to him while he was in jail. She shared everything with him, even the meals she cooked.
But Mrs Saulat felt betrayed by how the MQM had kept their hope alive for years, only to leave them alone at the end.
Once I had everything I needed, it took me three days to complete the story, rewriting it several times, in order to do it justice. Tribune’s website carried the story first, hours before Saulat was to be hanged. The experiment of filing exclusively to the web did wonders, as it went on to become one of the most-read stories of the year.
But there was also criticism. Some complained that the victims’ families ought to be interviewed. Others accused us of glorifying and humanising terrorists. Of course, it seemed everyone had forgotten that foreign journalists have interviewed Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden in the past.
I did the story because it was a story about a relationship that needed to be told. It wasn’t about Saulat, about the cases, or about the murders.
The story was about the love of his life – one that stood by his side for 18 years; one that put her head on his dead body, weeping as she said her final farewell.
Rabia Ali
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Lost Tales was initially imagined as a story that would offer insight into some of the most unforgettable songs in the Pakistani music industry, but it turned out to be a lot bigger than that. As artists started opening up about the stories behind their music, it started shaping into a history lesson; an archiving project that is going to remind us of the better days of Pakistani arts and culture. However, before anything, the biggest challenge was to come up with just 10 songs that left a huge impact on the music industry and with the likes of Sajjad Ali and Awaz on the list, locking one song became next to impossible.
Faakhir was adamant that Mai Na Manoo Haar was a more influential track than Jadoo ka Charagh but I had to keep the larger impact in mind and so, decided against it.
After reading the first part of the story, I received calls from a few Lahore-based artists, who accused me of ignoring musicians from Lahore being a Karachi-based journalist. But their concerns were put to rest after learning that Jal and Noori would feature in the second part.
Lost tales of Pakistan's 10 game-changing songs - Part 2
Such constant petty issues aside, the real challenge was to get the musicians talking about the real stories behind their songs. It took three hours to convince Aamir Zaki to open up on the record about how his divorce led to the making of Mera Pyar. Mohammad Ali Shyhaki, on the other hand, wanted to speak more about how Coke Studio ignored him rather than what lead to the making of Teray Ishq Mae Jo Bhi. Both Atif Aslam and Goher were interested to know if we are talking to both of them about the success of Aadat and Mekaal Hasan, who produced the track, refrained from saying anything, stating our regressive and stuck-in-the-90’s mindset. “Aap hamaray band kay baray mein kyun kuch nahin likhtay,” Mekaal had said.
It seemed the entire music industry contacted us after the story went up and suggested a wider documentation of musicians in Pakistan. The response was so awe-inspiring that some of readers even approached us to compile a short-history of Pakistani rock n roll in the form of a book or to convert it into a published research which they were willing to fund. Fingers crossed.
Rafay Mahmood
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For a reporter, sometimes it takes just a phone call to get a story that can go on to change an individual’s life and have an impact across borders.
One evening in July, as I was waiting for my husband in the office lobby and killing time on Facebook, I stumbled upon a status by activist Ansar Burney.
He claimed that Salman Khan’s character in the Bollywood film Bajrangi Bhaijaan resembled him as in 2012, he had gone to India in hopes of locating the family of Geeta, a deaf and mute Indian girl who had mistakenly crossed the border into Lahore and had been living in Pakistan since over a decade.
The next minute, I found myself calling him, wondering if Geeta was still living in Lahore and if so, our correspondent in Lahore could visit her. In fact, I was a lot more confident, and my gut instinct told me she perhaps was someplace nearer and I could meet her myself.
“Ansar bhai, where is Geeta?” I blurted out, after the usual exchange of pleasantries.
“She is at Edhi home. In Karachi.”
“Edhi home?” I repeated. “In Karachi?”
My heart raced as I called the Edhi spokesperson, whom I had known for years.
“Anwar sb, why didn’t you tell me about Geeta? Where is she? I am coming tomorrow to meet her,” I said already anxious, hyper and excited.
The interview was fixed. I informed my city editor and one of our photographers Athar was assigned to take pictures.
I spent half the night in anticipation, and the next afternoon stuck in traffic in the narrow and crowded streets of Mithadar.
Finally, we met. There Geeta was, petite, thin, with a huge smile on her face, standing at the modest Edhi office. We shook hands.
I had never really interviewed a hearing and speech impaired person before, and didn’t know how to communicate, but thankfully, Faisal, Edhi’s son was there, and was great help in that regard.
Geeta took me to her praying room decorated with posters of Hindu deities. She showed me her writings. I noticed the number ‘193’ scribbled; maybe this was her house number, I thought to myself.
I showed her India’s map on my phone. She looked at it and started crying, pointing towards Jharkhand and Telangana.
“We have to help her, we have to find her family,” I said to Faisal. Geeta had been living with the Edhis for the last 13 years, away from home and unable to tell anyone where her family was. Thirteen years.
The next day, our newspaper printed the story on the front page and the website gave it prominent space. A few hours later, the Press Trust of India lifted my story, and ran it across news websites, and do my dismay, without giving us credit.
Two days later, the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan flew from Islamabad to meet Geeta. India’s Minister for External affairs Sushma Swaraj tweeted about Geeta. Pakistani and Indian media continuously ran stories about her. Salman Khan spoke to Geeta. Families in India began recognising her as theirs.
I didn’t break the story. In 2012, journalists had already reported on her, but in 2015, I was glad to raise the issue again and help bring it to prominence.
Geeta is home now, but she has yet to find her family – the journey is not complete.
Maybe a journalist on the other side can help her track her family, perhaps by starting with a phone call.
Rabia Ali
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The 2010 spot-fixing scandal was the biggest cricketing controversy of Pakistan, if not of the entire sport, so it felt apt to mark its five-year anniversary; the day the bans on Mohammad Amir, Mohammad Asif and Salman Butt were scheduled to end and the proverbial dust was to settle.
We benefited from having the support of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), who wanted the public to know their version of the events after staying mum about it for half a decade despite being questioned and criticised by the media, the people and the three players themselves.
I travelled to Lahore to meet a PCB lawyer, then PCB chief Ijaz Butt, the PCB chief that helped fast-track Amir’s return, Najam Sethi, the current PCB chief Shaharyar Khan and of course the three players.
The reception was also often in contrast, ranging from Sethi’s wary “I am a very media-savvy person, so don’t try to pull any tricks on me”, to Asif’s “jo likhna hai likh do, bus acha sa likh dayna” to Salman’s “the PCB have strictly told me to not talk to anyone about this”.
Invariably, not all were available nor were all of them willing to talk but the pieces started to fall in place and the blanks started to get filled slowly but surely.
Certain things — speculations, hyperbole and biased statements — had to be filtered out, including a statement by an ‘anonymous’ official sitting in the highest echelons of PCB headquarters and claiming that Amir would soon return, despite certain players being against it, but that Asif and Salman would never don the green of Pakistan again. The claim has proved almost prophetic but was then given off the record.
The idea, and most of the contacts, came from Emmad Hameed but the entire sports desk came through for us.
In the end, over 2,500 miles travelled, nearly a week spent negotiating the wet roads of Lahore, dozens of calls and interviews resulted in 6,000 words of perhaps the most in-depth article on the events that shook the game most loved in Pakistan.
Taha Anis
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I don't remember exactly when I became fixated by Agha Hasan Abedi and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), but I recall reading somewhere that BCCI was one of the largest banks in the world before it was forced to shut down on money laundering charges.
It was an enterprise conceived by a Pakistani banker and run primarily by South Asians.
These facts were enough to merit a deep study of this subject. Unfortunately, no one in Pakistan had bothered to write a book. A few newspaper articles and a satire of no value written by Tariq Ali were the only easily available sources.
But BCCI was a grand story in every aspect. In the early 1990s, soon after bank’s closure, every major publication covered its demise. As investigation reports were leaked, journalists from London to New York jumped onto the leaks to get hold of details of how money was moved for drug cartels and dictators.
As I started working on the story, I came across references to half a dozen books written by British and American journalists. None of these are available in Pakistan.
A friend in the US was kind enough to purchase five of them and send them to me in Karachi. One of them titled The Infiltrator was published in 2009 by Robert Mazur, a former US Customs agent who led the sting operation against BCCI to expose its links with a drug cartel.
This may sound strange coming from a journalist but us reporters have an in-built fear of rejection, which only becomes more entrenched as one adds more years to experience. Our lust for information aside, the fear of being shunned by a source can be difficult to overcome. Time and again, I have resisted approaching a source just because I was sure they would not talk. And I had been wrong … each time.
So, after I tracked down Mazur at his Florida office from where he now runs a consultancy, I was surprised he answered the phone. After a brief chat and exchange of a few emails, we agreed to speak over the phone (by now, he was in London where a movie based on his book was being filmed).
Mazur, who was once a key witness in the investigations against BCCI and someone whose information was sought by every major newspaper, spoke to me for an hour. He was candid, open and polite.
But after my story was published, I was in for a surprise – he sent a long clarification, alleging how I wilfully withheld important information to support a particular point of view.
Mazur did not even give a chance to The Express Tribune to review that clarification and leaked it to a website.
He did not deny specifically any passage or quote of the story. Instead, he listed some of the points that I should have mentioned in the story, like his claim that BCCI had links with Medellin Cartel members before he started the sting operation.
All I can say at this point is that I intend to do more stories on BCCI in the coming year. And this time it would be the victims who'll talk.
Saad Hasan
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E-sports or competitive gaming is an unknown, almost non-existent industry in Pakistan. With a current estimated global market of $750 million, it is projected to be one of the next billion-dollar industries. However, video games are still considered a ‘waste of time’.
In Pakistani households, it would be an apocalyptic catastrophe if a teenager was to explain that he wanted to do play games for a living.
So, when a 15-year-old Pakistani, Syed Sumail Hassan, got inducted by California based competitive gaming group Evil Geniuses, it was not only that the world saw a prodigy, it was also a ray of hope for all those Pakistani kids who spend several hours a day trying to make it big in a virtual world.
Not only did Sumail achieve gaming immortality by becoming the youngest gamer to earn $1 million in eSports winnings within a year of professional Dota 2, he also became the youngest known winner of The International.
It was not difficult to find a prodigy like Sumail, but it definitely would have been difficult to digest for parents who stop their kids from "wasting precious time" on video games.
Farjad Khan
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As the title suggests, 59 most powerful images in Pakistan’s history is a photo compilation of some of the major events that have taken place in Pakistan since its inception. The piece charted the highs and lows our nation has faced in its 69-year history.
Working on this story and tracing back our history, I realised just how much blood, sweat and tears have been shed in earning the freedom that we have – something most of us take for granted. Unfortunately, the pace of my job does not allow me to savour the stories that I work on, so while I was going through the archives and looking for images to add to this collection, I felt a surge of patriotism and saw Pakistan from a different, wider, more positive perspective.
The process of collecting, researching and putting together the images took a total of three weeks, with the compilation becoming one of the most viewed pages on our website in 2015 with over 5,000 shares. For someone who had not touched a history book in several years, I felt proud to be a part of this project. It turned out to be a great learning experience for me and I couldn’t be happier about the overwhelming feedback we received.
Urooj Samana
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This year we ventured into a new territory – quizzes. We started doing them as a way to engage readers and give them a break from hard news.
I initially thought people would be interested in finding out which Pakistani leader they were similar to, but this was challenging since followers of certain political personalities do not want to hear anything against their favourite leaders. This is why I focused on traits that were most apparent to the public. The quiz was, to our surprise, a massive success and remains our most taken quiz to date.
The icing on the cake was when satirical website Khabaristan Times did a story on the quiz with a humorous spin.
Sundar Waqar
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While not technically a story, we thought the quiz deserved recognition and inclusion on this list.
Earlier this year, the Center for Excellence in Journalism (CEJ) announced a competition for participants of a Pak-US journalists’ exchange program.
The competition spurred the idea to do a multimedia story on Pakistan’s education woes, as the country had missed its MDGs targets in the education sector as well.
I wanted to do video interviews of some experts in the field and then search for a case study, preferably a public school which is not in good condition. After visiting several districts in Hazara Division, it was difficult for me to select one school because almost every government school was a perfect case study.
I decided, therefore, to cover several schools including those from other areas. I visited schools in some tribal areas as well as the more accessible parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. I also inspected some schools in the capital territory and the adjacent Rawalpindi.
Some common features among all schools I visited were a alck of facilities, a crumbling structure, and the long distance from residential areas, along with the issues of corporal punishment and deficits in teachers' training.
In some schools, the number of students and teachers were negligible. Some others were shut down because the owner of the land was not ready to surrender his land rights, taking benefit of the lengthy judicial process and lethargic attitude on part of the government, as no one seemed to be actively pursuing such public interest litigation.
"Why 25 million children in Pakistan are out of school" got the first-runner up award from jurists. On this success, though, I am not happy, I am not excited I am not estatic. I am speechless and I am ashamed.
Azam Khan
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As morbid it may sound, I was lucky enough to actually do a story that could feature a graveyard and life together.
I was sold the moment I received an email from the non-governmental organization Right to Play announcing that they were planning to inaugurate a football field in Makli where an all girl football match was taking place.
I respond to the organisers immediately and was soon on my way to watch the match and inspect the pitch. It was only after reaching Makli that I realised there was an opportunity, there were only two other journalists from other organisations who had decided to cover it.
Makli was probably a turn off for many who may have assumed that a small graveyard town has no big story to tell. But the reality was different; I met the school girls who had been training to play football from Thatta, Makli and the adjacent areas. They were a surprise – they donned the shorts and the shirt over their school uniforms which were ajrak-printed kameez and white shalwar.
All the featured players in the match told me that they have been following the Indian Super League and most of them did not know much about Pakistani football, or European for that matter. However, learning the game and chanting the Indian Super League anthem somehow made them feel important and gave them something to dream about.
The project of resurrecting the football pitch was sanctioned by the Qatar Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy (QSCDL) who partnered with Right to Play in Pakistan. The Rs2m project was about giving hope to school girls, that they could practice their right to be free in a four-walled ground while living in a conservative society. They were also learning important life lessons from their school-teachers turned football coaches through the sport.
I went to Makli Gymkhana, which seemed to be in a bad shape compared to the last time I visited it in 2011. On my way back I really hoped that the new football pitch would not become anything like the gymkhana or like the ancient graveyard that Makli is known for. These girls deserve more opportunities that can help them leave a legacy of their own.
Natasha Raheel
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No story on water in Karachi is complete without the reporter contracting gastroenteritis. Mercifully, a tablet of Ciproxin revived me enough from the effects of the fecal-matter laced well water at Future Morr to start writing Aqua Final. I titled it ‘The end of water’ because we all know the story may have been on the water crisis of summer 2015 but this news is not going to go away. My headline reflected my state of mind: I believe no story is done until you feel the Pain. This one took two months but those two months felt like a lifetime of pain because the subject was so vast and the terrain so shaky.
For example, the data of crackdowns on illegal hydrants was impossible to scrape because it was so disorganized. But it revealed a small truth, which I feel was the triumph of the story: given to the Supreme Court was data of FIRs registered for water theft in Baldia. A line of inquiry that emerged after our mapping revealed that Baldia's people had no choice but to steal from the mains because the KWSB hadn’t laid a network of pipelines to actually distribute water to their neighbourhoods and homes.
The breadth of the subject — water in Karachi — was daunting enough to take on. But I learnt something else on this assignment: Ferya Ilyas and Khurram Siddiqui joined the effort and reminded me that I didn’t always have to chew everything that I bit off.
But most of all, perhaps it is stories like these that speak of the editors who dream them up. Tribune Editor Kamal Siddiqi told me find out why we had a shortage of water. Just go ask the questions, he told me as I wept and wailed at his desk that I couldn’t possibly do such a big story. Just go ask.