Third ‘missing’ Pakistan activist returns home

Blogger Asim Saeed returned home over the weekend, police sources said but did not give any details of his whereabouts during the period he was said to be “missing”. Local media reports quoted a sister of Saeed as saying that he reached home “safely”.

Unconfirmed media reports here said he has left Pakistan but officials showed ignorance about those reports.

Saeed had been missing since January 4, along with another blogger Waqas Goraya, who reportedly returned home yesterday.

Another activist Salman Haider, a professor at the Fatima Jinnah University in Rawalpindi, too returned home yesterday.

The details about Haider’s whereabouts during the period was not known. It is believed that Haider ran a popular group ‘Bhensa’ on Facebook on which messages and videos were shared against fundamentalist groups as well as the Pakistan Army.

It was not known whether they were kidnapped or where they were kept. Activists have been blaming secret agencies for it but the government has vehemently denied any role of the state authorities.

A United Nations human rights expert on January 12 called on the Pakistani authorities to make it a priority to locate and protect the disappeared human rights and social media campaigners, saying no government should tolerate attacks on its citizens.