Muhammad Khan

On the afternoon of 16 October 2018, a body was discovered in the Hattar industrial area in the Haripur district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, northern Pakistan. Police identified the deceased as 30-year-old Muhammad Sohail Khan, a journalist with the local Urdu newspaper Kay-2.

Khan had been travelling home from the police station, where he had just registered a complaint about threats he had been receiving from local drug dealers, and asked for protection, when he was attacked in broad daylight by two unidentified gunmen on motorbikes. According to the results of the police investigation, Khan was shot nine times – in the head, chest and shoulder – with a 9 mm pistol; he died on the spot.

Ali Jadoon, a police officer who accompanied Khan home from the police station that day, had waited at a local hostel while the journalist made a detour to drop off some school kids he had given a lift to. Jadoon recalled, ‘When [Khan] was coming back to me, I heard nine shots. He was gunned down some 500 metres away from me.’

Khan had been campaigning against Haripur’s dangerous drug mafia for five years before he was killed. He had been relentless in exposing the syndicate and their activities in his reporting on the local illicit-narcotics trade, despite immense pressure on him to stop.

At the time of his murder, the region’s illicit-drugs trade was flourishing, and its commodities were becoming as easily available as any legal goods. The Haripur police department had recently made some progress in combating the trade, with the arrest of Mussarat Iqbal, a formidable drug lord whose domain and exploits had been the subject of Khan’s fearless media campaign. Interestingly, the two were related: Iqbal was Khan’s uncle.

Iqbal’s two sons – Khan’s cousins – Hamayun Iqbal and Ali Sher, were revealed to have orchestrated the murder. To avenge their father’s arrest, which they blamed on Khan’s reporting, the two had organized for the courageous and motivated journalist to be assassinated the following day.

On 17 October, the day after the murder, police issued arrest warrants for the two men, themselves notorious drug dealers. Hamayun Iqbal and Ali Sher, who had gone on the run, were charged with murder by the Haripur police, and tracked down and arrested within a week of Khan’s death. Hamayun Iqbal was arrested on 24 October in Chaman; Ali Sher was apprehended in Karachi two days later.

They are currently awaiting trial. However, being relatives of Khan’s, they are negotiating an agreement that would involve the payment of blood money to the murder victim’s family in exchange for their pardon. This provision in the law is prevalent in Pakistan, where local village councils frequently settle disputes through consensus from all the parties involved.

A week before Khan was murdered, Mussarat Iqbal had threatened him directly, warning him to stop reporting about the drugs trade and the family’s illicit activities or face the direst of consequences. According to Khan’s brother, Farrukh Shahzad, the mafia had tried to buy the journalist’s silence, offering him US$1 000 a month in exchange for keeping quiet about the particular issue of drugs being sold to the area’s youth. ‘Hashish and heroin were common drugs among the youth and were sold very cheap, at around 20 cents per cigarette. They were easily available,’ Shahzad revealed.

Said Shahzad: ‘People in our area used to warn me of their fears, that Sohail Khan was fighting a loner’s fight against a very powerful and entrenched drug mafia, and that my brother, with all his will and desire, was no match, and actually they would advise me to ask him to give up his fearless reporting against the drug mafia.’