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A senior Pakistani journalist living in hiding in Kenya was shot and killed by police after the car he was in sped up instead of stopping at a roadblock near Nairobi, police have said.
Police said it was a case of “mistaken identity” that occurred during a search for a similar car involved in a case of child abduction.
Arshad Sharif, 50, had been living in Kenya after leaving Pakistan in July to avoid arrest after criticising the country’s powerful military.
Nairobi police said Sharif was shot in the head and killed on Sunday night after the car in which he was travelling with his brother, Khurram Ahmed, drove through a roadblock on the Nairobi-Magadi highway.
The two ignored police orders to stop and sped up. “They did not stop and proceeded with the journey,” the police said. Officers opened fire and pursued the vehicle, which overturned.
Sharif’s wife, Javeria Siddique, confirmed her husband had been killed in Kenya. Ahmed’s condition was not immediately known.
Sharif left Pakistan to avoid arrest following a citizen’s complaint against him on allegations of maligning the country’s national institutions, a reference to the military. His whereabouts were not known; most of his friends knew only that he had spent time in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates and London.
Nairobi police said it would hand over the case to the independent policing oversight authority for further investigation.
“We had an incident of shooting which turned [out] to be a case of mistaken identity involving a journalist. We will release more information later,” a senior Kenyan police officer said earlier, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
According to police, the roadblock was set up to find and intercept a car similar to Sharif’s after a carjacking in the Pangani area of the Kenyan capital during which a child was taken hostage.
The Pakistani president, Arif Alvi, the prime minister, Shahbaz Sharif, who is not related to the journalist, the country’s military and other senior officials in Pakistan expressed their condolences.
A month after he left Pakistan, the private ARY Television fired Arshad Sharif, saying he had repeatedly criticised the military on social media in violation of the TV station’s policy. His talkshow Powerplay, which aired on Mondays and Thursdays, was discontinued.
Earlier in the year the station had remained critical of Pakistan’s prime minister after the ousting of his predecessor, Imran Khan, in a no-confidence vote in parliament in April. Khan claims he was removed in a US plot, a charge both Washington and the Pakistani government deny.
On Monday, Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf party and its senior leaders, including Fawad Chaudhry, condemned Sharif’s killing and demanded a detailed investigation.
In August, a court in Islamabad asked Pakistan’s intelligence agency and police to stop harassing Sharif after the journalist, through his lawyer, petitioned the court, saying his fundamental rights were being violated by security forces. Police and the government at the time confirmed Sharif was being sought in a complaint case but said no action had been carried out to arrest Sharif.
Pakistan has long been an unsafe country for journalists. In 2020, it ranked ninth on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual global impunity index, which assesses countries where journalists are regularly killed and the assailants go free.
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