Pakistani BBC reporter says abductors beat him

A Pakistani reporter for the BBC said he was released today by unknown men in the capital, Islamabad, a day after they abducted, blindfolded and beat him.

Dilawar Khan Wazir, from the BBC’s Urdu-language service, said he was snatched from a taxi in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, by a group of men who bundled him into another car and sped away.

He said he did not know why he was targeted.

“I was sitting in a taxi when five or six people grabbed me,” Wazir said. “Then I was blindfolded and taken to unknown place. I was beaten.”

Today, the men put him into a car and left him in a deserted area in Islamabad, he said.

Wazir’s brother suggested Pakistani security agents may have kidnapped the reporter, while press watchdogs demanded government action to find him.

State Information Minister Tariq Azeem Khan denied government intelligence agency involvement in Wazir’s abduction, but said investigations were continuing into who carried it out, if it was linked to his 15-year-old brother’s kidnapping and killing in August, and whether it was part of a family feud.

Aamer Ahmed Khan, editor of BBC’s Urdu service in Pakistan, said Wazir was in a state of shock and has provided no details on his abductors or their motive.

“He is back and he is apparently unharmed, but he is still in a state of shock,” Khan said.

Wazir had been visiting his brother, Zulfikar Ali, at his university hostel yesterday before setting off to return to his home in Dera Ismail Khan, a town in the North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan.

Ali said someone claiming to be a doctor had telephoned him shortly afterward, saying his brother had been injured in a road accident and taken to the state-run Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in Islamabad.

The BBC and Ali both sent envoys to the hospital, but could not locate Wazir.

Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders released a statement saying it feared Wazir was Pakistan’s ”latest victim of kidnappings of reporters,” and cited the case of Hayatullah Khan, a journalist kidnapped in Pakistan’s north-western tribal region and found murdered in June.

Members of Khan’s family accused Pakistan’s intelligence service of involvement. Authorities blamed militants but have refused to make public findings from a probe into the disappearance.

At least 10 Pakistan journalists have either vanished or been killed this year after apparently covering topics sensitive to the government or Islamic militants.

Wazir was based in the South Waziristan tribal region before moving to Dera Ismail Khan following threats by suspected Islamic militants, angered by his reporting.

In February 2005, Wazir survived a gun attack on a bus near Wana. Two other journalists died in the incident.

No one claimed responsibility for either attack.