Six months on, Samar Abbas still missing

Family, police say little to no information found about his whereabouts

ISLAMABAD: Nearly six months after he went missing, police have found no clues to the whereabouts of a Karachi native who went missing from the capital in January this year.

Samar Abbas, a resident of the Gulshan-e-Iqbal area in Karachi, was visiting the capital when he disappeared on January 7.

Ramna police had subsequently also registered a case of kidnapping over Abbas’s disappearance on January 15, but officials have remained tight-lipped over the matter since.



Inspector Irshad Ali Abro, who heads the Ramna police station, told The Express Tribune that they had made no progress in the case and have no idea where Abbas is.

He added that when they pulled up Abbas’s call and phone location records, it showed that he had last visited a spot in Sector G-11 in the capital.

One of Abbas’ acquaintances who was with him in Islamabad, had told Abbas’ family that the activist left his place on June 7 saying he would soon return after completing some work.

Meanwhile, Abbas’s brother Syed Ashar Abbas echoed the inspector’s comments that there had been no progress in police investigations.

Ashar had also approached the Islamabad High Court for the recovery of his missing sibling. In the petition filed in the high court in February, he had listed the Islamabad Police, as well as chiefs of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Intelligence Bureau (IB), the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) and secretary of the Interior Ministry as respondents.

Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani is expected to take up the case on June 15.

“It’s been six months [since his disappearance]. I do not know where we should go,” Ashar said, adding that no one had told them anything about his missing brother.



Abbas had disappeared a day after activist Salman Haider had gone missing from the capital. Social media activists Waqas Goraya and Asim Saeed disappeared from Lahore on January 4, Ahmed Raza Naseer went missing from Sheikhupura on January 7.

Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali said that some information had been collected through the CCTV cameras of Safe City Projects about Haider, who went missing after spending a few hours with his friends in Islamabad’s Bani Gala area. While Haider returned home on January 27, Abbas remains missing.

Curiously, the police did not pursue Haider’s case after his family withdrew their complaint.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 7^th, 2017.