KNZ NEWS DESK
Published at October 21, 2017A Pakistani woman journalist who was kidnapped while pursuing the case of an Indian engineer two years ago has been rescued, officials said.
Zeenat Shahzadi, a 26-year-old reporter of Daily Nai Khaber and Metro News TV channel, went missing on August 19, 2015, when some unidentified men allegedly kidnapped her while she was en route to her office in an auto-rickshaw from her home in a populated locality of Lahore.
Shahzadi was believed to have forcibly disappeared while working on the case of Indian citizen Hamid Ansari, before her abduction. Ansari went missing within the country in November 2012.
Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (CIED) President Justice (retd.) Javed Iqbal said on Friday evening that Shahzadi had been rescued from an area on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on October 19 night.
“Non-state actors and anti-state agencies had abducted her and she has been rescued from their custody,” Iqbal said, adding tribals from Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provinces had played a key role in her recovery.
“Zeenat Shahzadi today has been reunited with her family in Lahore and we are happy for her safe recovery. I am thrilled that she is home safe,” rights activist Beena Sarwar said.
Ansari, a Mumbai resident arrested in 2012 for illegally entering Pakistan from Afghanistan reportedly to meet a girl he had befriended online.
Shahzadi submitted application to the CIED that ordered registration of the FIR in 2014. At the same time, she also filed a habeas corpus petition in the Peshawar High Court.
A writ of habeas corpus is used to bring a prisoner or other detainee before the court to determine if the person’s imprisonment or detention is lawful.
Ansari was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment reportedly by a military court on charges of illegally entering Pakistan and spying. (PTI)
