Saleem Shahzad: Pakistan journalist flirted with danger

By Arman Sabir BBC Urdu

 

Saleem Shahzad disappeared after leaving his home in Islamabad on Sunday evening

"If they don't respond to what you report, it probably means they are planning to pick you up."

This is what the journalist, Saleem Shahzad, told one of his friends the day before he was abducted and killed, allegedly by Pakistani intelligence.
I first met Shahzad when he was working for a private news agency, back in the late 1990s.
By that time, he was already a well-known journalist, though mostly for his startling stories on local crime in the Karachi evening newspaper, The Star.
A few minutes with him were enough to convince you that he was one of those journalists who had not yet found his "big story". And that he would not rest until he did.
Like hundreds of other journalists around the world, he got his break with 9/11.
Moving to the Hong Kong-based news website, Asia Times Online, he started reporting on the so-called "war on terror" and seemed to have found his calling in life.
From Kabul to Baghdad, Shahzad loved to put himself in the thick of things and it was not long before I heard that he had disappeared along with his interpreter somewhere in Afghanistan.
For several days, we knew nothing about him until he resurfaced in Quetta. But he refused to say much about where he had been.
He was that kind of a guy - never too worried about what he was getting into and often unwilling to talk about what he had gotten away with.

 

The Taliban - including late leader Baitullah Mehsud, seen here in 2008 - were the focus of much of Saleem Shahzad's reporting

Years of reporting on al-Qaeda and its affiliates based in Pakistan seemed to have convinced him that 9/11 had caused an ideological split of sorts in the country's armed forces.
As recently as the third week of May, he had expounded his theory in detail in a video interview with the website, therealnews.com,



about the aftermath of Bin Laden's killing.
No wonder that calls from Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency, the ISI, were a norm for him.
He once joked that a colonel working in the ISI had called him and said: "We haven't had any complaint against you for such a long time that I feel like buying you a cup of tea."
Shahzad recently published his insights in his book, Inside al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and his friends say that his second book on al-Qaeda's strategy is currently being edited.
He was often asked why he loved to flirt with danger despite the fact that he had a young family - two sons and a daughter. But he would only smile in response. GO TO SOURCE....