Pakistan court order over missing activist Kareem Khan

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Pakistan court order over missing activist Kareem Khan

Kareem Khan has not been heard from for a week

A court in Pakistan has ordered the government to produce an anti-drone activist who lawyers say was detained by the country's intelligence agencies.

Kareem Khan went missing days before he was due to testify before European parliamentarians about the impact of drone strikes on his country.


His lawyers say he was picked up from his residence in Rawalpindi last week and has not been heard from since.


Police deny any involvement. The high court set the hearing for 20 February.


Kareem Khan's brother and teenage son were killed in a drone attack in North Waziristan in 2009.

"The Rawalpindi bench of Lahore High Court has sought reply from the intelligence agencies through the government, ordering the intelligence agencies to produce Kareem Khan on 20 February or give the reason behind his arrest in writing to the court," his lawyer Shahzad Akbar told AFP news agency.

"The police in their report did mention that Khan was picked up by men wearing police uniform but they said it was not them," he said, adding that he was not hopeful that intelligence agencies would produce his client.

Civilian casualties in US drone strikes in Pakistan tribal areas have become a very sensitive issue

On Tuesday Amnesty International said: "We are concerned that prominent human rights activist Kareem Khan may have been disappeared to prevent him from giving testimony overseas about US drone strikes in Pakistan."

Quoting witnesses, the group said Mr Khan had been taken away by more than "a dozen men, some in police uniforms, others in plain clothes" early on 5 February.

Nearly a decade after they first took to the skies over Pakistan's unruly tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, America's unmanned drone aircraft are causing fierce controversy in both the United States and Pakistan.

American officials argue the drone attacks are vital in the fight against Taliban and al-Qaeda militants based in the border area and that they take "extraordinary care" to ensure the strikes comply with international law.

Several thousand people have been killed in the attacks, many of them militants - but precise numbers and the identities of victims are in dispute.

United Nations rapporteur Ben Emmerson and other researchers have estimated at least 400 civilian deaths from drones since 2004.

Local claims of the numbers of civilian deaths are almost impossible to prove. One reason is the restricted media access in the region. The other is the militants' tendency to cordon off the targeted sites and conduct quick burials.


Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has called for an end to drone attacks in his country, saying the attacks violate Pakistan's sovereignty.


But correspondents say Pakistan is widely thought to co-operate in the strikes.

 

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Pakistan Kidnaps Drone War Critic
Pakistan's elected government claims to oppose U.S. drone strikes. So why has it kidnapped a prominent drone war critic?

By Medea Benjamin, February 12, 2014.

Drone war critic Kareem Khan holds up pictures of his brother and son, who were killed in a U.S. drone strike. Khan has reportedly been abducted by Pakistani authorities.

Kareem Khan, a journalist from the tribal area of Waziristan, told us the heartbreaking story of a drone strike that killed his son and brother. Since then, Khan has been seeking justice through the Pakistani courts and organizing other drone strike victims. On February 10, he planned to fly to Europe for meetings with German, Dutch, and British parliamentarians to discuss the negative impact drones are having on Pakistan. But days before his trip, in the early hours of the morning on February 5, he was kidnapped from his home in Rawalpindi by 15-20 men in police uniform and plain clothes. He has not been seen since.

Terrified, Khan’s wife said the men did not disclose their identities and refused to say why her husband was being taken away.

Khan’s tragic story began on December 31, 2009. He had been working as a journalist in the capital, Islamabad, leaving his family back home in Waziristan. On New Year’s Eve, he got an urgent call from his family: their home had just been struck by a U.S. drone, and three people were dead: Kahn’s 18 year-old son Zahinullah, his brother Asif Iqbal, and a visiting stonemason who was working on the village mosque.

The news reports alleged that the target of the strike had been a Taliban commander, Haji Omar, but Khan insisted that Haji Omar was nowhere near the village that night. Khan also told us that the same Taliban commander had been reported dead several times by the media. “How many times could the same man be killed?” Khan asked.

Khan’s son had just graduated from high school, and his brother was a teacher at the local school. Khan’s brother taught his students that education was far more powerful than weapons. The drone strike that killed their teacher taught the students a very different lesson.

Khan was the first family member of a drone victim to take the issue into the Pakistani courts. With the help of human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar, he sent a legal notice to the American embassy in Islamabad, detailing the wrongful deaths and accusing the CIA of grossly violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Speaking outside a police station after he had lodged a legal complaint, Khan asked that Jonathan Banks, the CIA station chief in Islamabad, be forbidden from leaving Pakistan until he answered to the charges against him. (While CIA agents’ identities are secret, Banks’ name had been revealed in the local press.) While the accusation against Banks made headlines in Pakistan, the CIA chief was allowed to flee the country. But in the ensuing months, Khan organized other families of victims and jointly, they have been pressing their cases in several lawsuits now pending in Pakistani courts.

Khan has obviously been an embarrassment to the U.S. government, which is responsible for the drone strikes. And it has put the Pakistani government in an uncomfortable position. On the one hand the Pakistani government—from Prime Minister Zardari to the legislature—has come out publicly against the U.S. use of drones. But Pakistan is heavily dependent on U.S. aid, and the government has been unwilling to bring charges against the United States in international bodies or send an irrefutable rebuke by shooting down a U.S. drone.

Given the political backroom deals that have obviously been going on between the United States and Pakistan, Khan took great risks by speaking out. “Kareem Khan is not only a victim, but an important voice for all other civilians killed and injured by U.S. drone strikes,” said Khan’s lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who is also Director of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights. “Why are Pakistani officials so scared of Kareem and his work that they felt the need to abduct him in an effort to silence his efforts?”

How tragically ironic that someone whose loved ones have been killed by a CIA drone program condemned by the Pakistani government has now been abducted by that very government. Pakistanis we have talked to say this could only happen on orders from the United States, which did not want Khan speaking out in Europe against U.S. policy.

Medea Benjamin is author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.

 

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Abducted Pakistani drone activist freed

Karim Khan tells Al Jazeera that he was tortured and kept handcuffed for eight days by unidentified men.


A Pakistani anti-drone campaigner, who was abducted from his family home last week, has been released.

Karim Khan told Al Jazeera on Friday that he had been kept handcuffed and blindfolded in what he called a "torture cell" for eight days, standing on his hands and feet.


He said he had been punched, slapped and beaten with a stick and a leather strip. The activist also said he was hung upside down at certain points, and that the soles of his feet were beaten with the leather strap.


Khan was abducted on the outskirts of Islamabad on February 5, just days before he had been due to testify before European parliamentarians about US drone attacks.


He said he was set free in the town of Tarnol, near the city of Rawalpindi, in the early hours of Friday.


Khan told Al Jazeera he had been thrown out of a van, still blindfolded but with his handcuffs taken off.

The activist said he had no idea who was responsible for his abduction, and did not cast blame on intelligence agencies, which had been suspected of holding him.

However, Khan's lawyer, Shazad Akbar, told Al Jazeera "it was definitely a government agency" that had seized him.

A Pakistani court had ordered the government to produce Khan by February 20 or provide the reason for his detention.

Khan's brother and teenage son were killed in a drone attack in North Waziristan in 2009.

Khan told Al Jazeera he would fly to Europe be part of the delegation briefing parliamentarians and that he would continue his work for the sake of "innocent people" who are killed by drones and "labelled as terrorists".

With reporting by Asad Hashim