Sidra Insar Chaudhary
Recently swedish police reported that they found a deadbody of a Pakistani national and this news has been the talk of the town since then. Sajid Hussain was a Pakistani journalist who went missing two months ago in Sweden has been found dead in a river, Swedish police said. Sajid Hussain’s body was found on April 23 in the Fyris River outside Uppsala, Jonas Eronen, a police spokesman, said, according to The Guardian newspaper. Hussain, the editor of the Balochistan Times news website, had been missing since early March. Eronen said a crime could not be completely ruled out but added that Hussain’s death could equally have been an accident or suicide.
In addition to writing about human rights violations in the southwestern Pakistani region, he reported on organized crime and forced disappearances, and wrote about an apparent drug kingpin in Pakistan. He was last seen boarding a train in Stockholm on March 2 to go to Uppsala, 70 kilometers north of the Swedish capital. Local police had said Hussain did get off the train in Uppsala 45 minutes after it left Stockholm. An official with Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Hussain’s controversial profile meant it could not be ruled out that he had been abducted and killed “at the behest of a Pakistani intelligence agency.”
The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) condemned what it described as a “brutal murder”. In a joint statement, PFUJ President Shahzada Zulfiqar and Secretary General Nasir Zaidi urged the Swedish government to immediately probe the death. “It is downright brutal to have happened in a country where free speech and expression is a hallmark of the government,” they said.
However another perspective came after initial investigations as they contradicted the claims of the press freedom charity who had suggested Pakistani intelligence was behind Hussain’s disappearance in early March.
“Swedish police spokesman told the BBC their initial investigation did not suggest any foul play in the death”, BBC wrote.
Also, the police spokesman added that while a crime could still not be completely ruled out, Hussain’s death could equally have been the result of an accident or a suicide. An online newspaper the Balochistan Times, for which Hussain was chief editor, reported his disappearance to Swedish police on 3 March, 2020. Relatives of the journalist told Pakistani newspaper Dawn that they had waited for two weeks before expressing their fears regarding disappearance of Sajid Hussain, in case he had gone into social isolation because of the coronavirus outbreak these days.
Associating an incident to a world reknowned agency by Guardian was very irresponsible and immature specially when initial investigations say otherwise.