EDITORIAL: Was the killing of prominent TV journalist Arshad Sharif in Kenya, a country in East Africa, a case of mistaken identity or was it a murder by design? This question has no easy answer at this point in time, at least.
However, it is important to note that while the Pakistan government wants a deeper probe into the incident, media and press unions at home and abroad have flatly refused to buy the Kenyan police’s version.
Sharif was away from Pakistan for about six months on self-imposed exile following the registration of a number of cases, including a sedition case, against him. It is widely speculated that Arshad Sharif had secretly landed in Kenya where he could not be seen or found; in other words, he was in hiding. But it is also speculated that the TV journalist was working on a documentary in that East African country unsurreptitiously.
Giving the Kenyan government’s stance on this utterly disturbing murder, Bruno Shioso, the spokesman for National Police, which is now under global scrutiny, said the journalist was fatally wounded by an officer after his car broke through a police barrier in the Magasi area, 40 kilometres from country’s capital Nairobi.
“It is then that they were shot at,” he said, adding the journalist was travelling with a man described as his brother, Khurram Khan. The car carrying the two men was struck by about nine bullets, but kept moving to reach the home of another Pakistani national. And “there Sharif was found to be dead”.
According to him, the barrier was erected to intercept a stolen car with an abducted child. But his claim was immediately disputed by the Kenyan media, which said that by the time the car in which the journalist was travelling was shot at the stolen car had already been recovered.
The media have also asked how come the bullets that killed the journalist were shot from side and front sides and quite closely as against the routine under which a runaway vehicle is shot at its back with its tyres being the primary target.
This murder has been widely condemned in Pakistan, and calls have been made for a thorough investigation into the circumstances that obtained at the time of his killing in order to determine, among other things, whether or not it was an extrajudicial killing.
This is important because some circles, including Imran Khan, tend to trace, albeit somewhat dangerously, a connection between his death and his anti-establishment comments on the television. But that’s not the case, insists ISPR, which has demanded a thorough investigation into the matter in order to ascertain, among other things, who had actually ‘forced’ Sharif to flee Pakistan.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, too, is anxious to know the whole truth. A three-member team is being sent to Kenya to examine the circumstances in which he was killed. But the questions whether Arshad Sharif had said something that others in the media don’t say routinely, and whether he deserved to be killed or eliminated and that too in a foreign country need plausible answers.
Shouldn’t we place his murder in the Kenyan atmospherics and wait for the truth to ultimately emerge on its own? Ironically, however, it is quite likely that we will have to await answers which will never arrive.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022