Justice for Ajay Lalwani

The manner in which journalists are killed and their murders not investigated puts a lot of questions before the govt

Earlier this month, Ajay Kumar Lalwani, a news correspondent for the Urdu-language publication, Daily Puchano, and a reporter for Royal News TV, was shot dead by unidentified assailants as he was sitting in a barber shop in the Saleh Pat area of Sukkur city.

Lalwani suffered three gunshot wounds and succumbed to his injuries soon after the attack despite being rushed to the nearby hospital. Journalists in Sukkur say that the 31-year-old journalist was vocal in highlighting issues that related to the Hindu community in Sindh.

In his statement to the police, Dileep Kumar, the father of the slain journalist, said that his son did not have any enmity. Police have formed a team to investigate the murder. But whether this leads to something remains to be seen.

It may be pointed out that at the time of his death, Lalwani was reporting on the extrajudicial murder of Irfan Jatoi, a second-year student of the University of Sindh in Jamshoro, who was picked up by police and later found dead near Sukkur, several hundred kilometres away.

According to family and friends, the police picked up Jatoi from the Sindh University hostel on February 8, claiming that the Political Sciences student was named in over 20 FIRs and had been on the run. He was kept in custody for over a month following which the family filed a petition in the Sindh High Court (SHC) in Karachi, Hyderabad, and Sukkur. The court instructed that Jatoi be presented in court on March 16, but the young man was killed soon after. Police said that the student was murdered in an exchange of fire under circumstances that need to be explained better.

When Jatoi’s family and other outraged members of the public took to the streets in Shikarpur and Jamshoro and demanded action against the police, many were charged with terrorism and treason charges. One can only wonder where this case goes from here.

One recalls the murder in March 2020 of Aziz Memon, a journalist associated with KTN News and the Sindhi-language Daily Kawish newspaper. His death remains to be fully investigated. Aziz’s body was recovered from a river on February 16, with a cable wrapped around his neck. According to Hafiz Memon, brother of the murdered journalist, Aziz had gone to cover a story in a nearby village. At the time, local police insisted that Aziz had died a natural death as the medical report did not confirm any violence or poisoning.

A new report was then released after journalists held a series of protests in which the cause of death was changed from natural causes to asphyxiation. This new report proved that a cover-up had taken place earlier at the behest of the local police. This happened only after the Sindh chief minister intervened.

In its remarks, the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) commented, “The tragic murder of Aziz Memon deserves swift justice, which is something Pakistani authorities have repeatedly failed to deliver for journalists. Given the victim’s previous allegations of threats from local officials, it is essential that the investigation be free from political meddling.”

According to a report released by the Freedom Network in end-2019, at least 33 journalists were murdered for their work in Pakistan in the past six years, including seven in the past one year (November 2018 to October 2019) alone. This is an exceptionally high number. The report issued a ‘Pakistan Impunity Scorecard’ which revealed that a total of 32 FIRs were registered for the murder of 33 journalists during the period 2013-19, of which police could file a challan in only 20 cases — or in 60% of cases. Out of the 33 cases, the courts declared only 20 cases fit for trial (60%) of which prosecution and trial was completed in only six cases — only 18%.

In these six cases, the killer was convicted in just one case but even there he escaped punishment after successfully getting the conviction overturned at the appeal stage after which the family of the murdered journalist abandoned its pursuit for justice for lack of resources.

Journalism is not a crime. But the manner in which journalists are killed and their murders not investigated puts a lot of questions before the government. Let justice prevail for a change.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, March 29^th, 2021.

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