Islamabad: A judicial magistrate court in Islamabad on Wednesday received remand for two days under the country’s cybercrime laws to post “threatening material” to journalist Waheed Murad in the custody of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA).
The FIA prepared journalist Waid Murad in front of Judicial Magistrate Abbas Shah and received his physical remand.
Murad’s lawyers Aman Zainab Mazari and Hadi Ali Chatha were also present in the court.
The FIA requested the court to give 10 days physical remand for the meaning. However, Mazari objected to the FIA’s request, questioning why his remand was needed because he was a journalist. He also asked if the FIA had sent any advance notice to the journalist.
On this occasion, Chattha requested the court to allow Murad’s legal team to watch an FIR against his client.
The judge asked about the time of the journalist’s arrest, in response to which FIA representatives said they had been taken into custody last night.
He said that Murad has made posts about Balochistan and the banned Balochistan Liberation Army Group, adding that his social media accounts need to be investigated and his cellphone needs to be recovered.
“Journalism in this country has become a crime in this country,” Murad’s lawyer, Chattha, said during the hearing. He added, “If there is no crime, the court can be removed and a judicial remand can be made. Journalists are arrested so that they can be harassed.”
The judge then approved the FIA Murad’s two -day physical remand.
Earlier, his family had filed a petition in the Islamabad High Court (IHC) for his recovery, stating that he had “forcibly disappeared” from his home in the federal capital “by unknown persons. This request was filed by lawyers by the mother of Murad’s mother -in -law,
The state, the Defense Ministry, the Islamabad Police Chief and the Karachi Company Police Station House Officer were registered as respondents in the matter.
Abida claimed that the journalist had disappeared from his house at 2:30 pm in Sector G -8, Islamabad, perhaps by unknown officials, perhaps by unknown officials belonging to intelligence agencies, and with black uniforms and two policemen with two policemen.
He described himself as an eyewitness to the disappearance of the implementation of the meaning, and the kidnappers themselves took away his phone.
The petition urged the IHC to instruct respondents to “immediately trace and produce” before the court.
The petition also requested that the authorities provide access to the lawyer and the family. He urged the IHC to instruct the respondents to make any allegations against the journalist and where it was being kept.
It was highlighted that Murad has recently raised his voice about the disappearance of two brothers of US journalist Ahmed Noorani.
Mazari told AFP, “His abduction pattern was the same as in the past.”
It was later revealed that section 9 (a crime glorification), 10 (cyber -terrorism), 20 (malicious code) and 26A (false and fake information punishment) were the first report against the journalist by the FIA’s Cyber Crime Reporting Center under the Electronic Crime Act (PECA), 2016.
It states that Murad has been found to be “sharing extremely scary content” on social media platforms, which led to “deliberately spreading/propaganda, fake, false, misleading and misinterpreted information against government workers”.
The FIR cited a recent social media post in Balochistan. It also states that he shared a fact -fox report by journalist Ahmed Noorani, “in which photographs of the family members of the Chief of Army Staff were publicly shared with a highly scary commentary in violation of their privacy.”
‘I was not tortured’
Answering a reporter’s question, Murad said, “I have not been tortured.”
He said he had asked the people who arrived at his house last night to identify himself. “Police broke the door and entered the house,” he said, adding that he had a mother -in -law cancer patient who had come to Canada for treatment, but was also allegedly beaten.
“I was handed over to the FIA twenty minutes ago,” he said in today’s court.
Rights worker, media brotherly ‘frightened’
On the other hand, rights activists and the media community expressed their concern over the arrest of the journalist.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said in a post on X that it was scared of reports of Murad’s abduction.
The HRCP said, “At this time, the abode of Murad is unknown. We demand that it be detected and rescued it safely and immediately and his kidnappers are brought to the book.”
