PESHAWAR, Pakistan – A Pakistani journalist has been kidnapped after photographing the metal remnants of what appeared to be a U.S. missile that killed a senior al-Qaida leader last week, his family said Wednesday.
Only a day before his disappearance Monday, Hayatullah Khan expressed fears that intelligence agencies might take action against him for sending his pictures to Pakistani and international media organizations, said the journalist’s older brother, Ihsanullah Khan.
Five masked men armed with AK-47 assault rifles abducted Hayatullah Khan in the town of Mir Ali, about 18 miles north of Miranshah, the administrative capital of the North Waziristan tribal area on the border with Afghanistan, witnesses said.
The journalist was heading toward a checkpoint east of Mir Ali to cover a student protest when the gunmen stopped his car. They whisked him away in another vehicle.
The al-Qaida operative, whom Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf identified as Egyptian Abu Hamza Rabia, was killed Dec. 1 when an explosion destroyed a mud-brick compound in the village of Asoray, east of Miranshah. Rabia was believed to be the commander of al-Qaida’s international operations.
Local residents said four other people died in the blast – two Arabs also believed to be members of al-Qaida and two members of a local Pushtun tribe, one of whom was a 7-year-old boy.
Musharraf said the blast occurred when Rabia was making bombs from explosives stored in the house. Pakistani authorities insisted the compound had not been attacked.
But residents of Asoray claimed the explosion was caused by a missile fired from a U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle, adding that a number of such drones fly round-the-clock over the remote border region.
They said metal pieces of the missile, photos of which Khan filed to the European Pressphoto Agency, were inscribed with the English words “guided missile.”
In Khan’s pictures, the fragments are also marked “AGM-114,” the U.S. military’s designator for the laser-guided Hellfire missile, which is carried on the remote-controlled Predator aircraft. The initials “US” also appeared on the shrapnel in photos filed by Khan, who also works for Pakistan’s Urdu-language daily newspaper Ausaf and the English-language daily The Nation.
U.S. counterterrorism operations in Pakistan are a sensitive political issue for Musharraf, who is under pressure from hard-line Islamic groups and nationalists who feel he has gone too far in supporting the U.S.
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