Blaming the victim: Medialogic ducks questions, hurls allegations

Presents fake statements which Express News has been presenting for two days as evidence

LAHORE:

The TV rating firm, Medialogic, has tried to evade the question regarding its attempt to blackmail Express News into paying Rs450m by levelling more allegations.

The company on Tuesday presented in a press conference some documents as proof which Express News has been showing since Monday.

These documents were extracted from a company employee, Shaista, whose brothers were kidnapped through some officials of Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) Lahore to force her into signing blank documents.

During his press conference, the Medialogic’s owner Salman Danish did not answer the question as to why Shaista’s brothers were released without any action after the CIA managed to get favourable statements from Shaiasta.

Journalists from different channels wanted to cover the press conference but they were not allowed to attend the briefing and stopped by Salman Danish’s security guards.

Rather than apologising for his blackmailing tactics and giving clarifications for his illegal actions, the Medialogic chief tried to give farfetched justifications for his false allegations and presented such lame proofs that stunned the participants.

Salman Danish presented sworn statements of three of his employees and said that they took money from Express News to raise its rating. However, he did not bother to tell how he used force to extract these statements from Shaista and her sister Nadia.

It was Express News that had already presented these statements and exposed their reality before the people.

Salman Danish also forgot to tell that he had arranged kidnapping of two of Shaista’s brothers with the help of the CIA police before these statements were written. She was forced to sign and put thumb impressions on plain and stamp-papers, as she later revealed in her television interview.

He showed the sworn declarations but did not explain as to why those who made these statements had now retracted them. Medialogic’s wrongdoing with Shaista and her family had been exposed two days back. However, he remained silent about the whole episode.

He did not say anything about the raid that he got carried out at Shaista’s residence nor he explained as to why he arranged kidnapping of Shaista’s brothers with the help of CIA.

Express News had raised issue of the shameful attitude of the CIA police with one of Meidalogic employees. Police had not respected the sanctity and privacy of a house. The police action also proved that Salman Danish was behind all this action.  He did not tell the audience as to what could a woman do except for signing on false documents, when her mother or sister or brothers had been kidnapped.

He did not explain as to why Shaista’s brothers were kidnapped and transferred from Rawalpindi to Lahore while a case was registered against her. He claimed that Shaista was never presented before the CIA, but did not try to explain the phone calls made by the CIA officials on her phone. The recordings of these calls are available with Express News and have been broadcast many times.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 9^th, 2015.