Muhammad Younas

Incident Description: Shot Dead

On August 28, 2014, Assignment Editor at ARY News, Bureau Chief at Online News Agency and Secretary-General of the Balochistan Union of Journalists, Irshad Mastoi was murdered along with two of his colleagues — a trainee reporter, Abdul Rasool Khajjak and an accountant, Muhammad Younas. Khajjak was a final year student of Mass Communication at Balochistan University. He had completed a three-month internship in the news agency and was working as a reporter.

Younas was serving as an accountant in the news agency for a number of years. At 7:45pm, Mastoi, Khajjak and Younas were working in the office in Quetta, the capital city of the Balochistan province, when two armed men with 9mm pistols barged into the office of the Online News Agency and shot them several times. Khajjak and Younas died on the spot, while Mastoi was injured and died enroute to Civil Hospital.

Initial examination had shown that the media workers suffered bullet wounds in the chest and head. Mastoi’s colleagues believe he was murdered because of his article on the eve of Baloch leader Nawaz Akbar Bugti’s eighth death anniversary. Some of his close friends, however, suspected the involvement of a politico-sectarian party in his killing because he did not publicize the party’s press releases and statements.

On September 29, 2014, then Balochistan Home Minister Sarfaraz Bugti announced the formation of a tribunal of enquiry consisting of Justice Muhammad Hashim Kakar of the Balochistan High Court (BHC). The commission report was sent to both the provincial chief minister and the chief secretary but it had not been public at the time.

Nearly a year later, on September 2, 2015, Bugti announced the arrest of two suspects — Shafqat Ali Rodani (alias Naveed) and Ibrahim Nachari (alias Shah Jee) — and presented them before the media. The minister had said that the accused were affiliated with the separatist militant group, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA). According to the government, the accused were not only responsible for murdering Mastoi and his colleagues but were also involved in 30 bomb explosions and a series of targeted killings in Quetta and other parts of the province.

A videotape of the confession of the accused was also played at a news conference. Local journalists in Balochistan, however, had pointed out a number of serious contradictions in the confessions of the accused that cast doubt on the authenticity of their statements. On October 13, 2015, an investigation team on the Quetta police force raided the houses of the militants (Rodani and Nachar) in the Mustang district and both the accused were killed in the encounter.

Mastoi’s family did not believe they were the actual killers. According to Mastoi’s cousin, Sarang Mastoi, the government had ended the case by killing the militants who were not implicated in the murder. Irshad's brother, Ashfaq Ahmed, also said that after the encounter the case had been closed but he thinks the main accused behind the murder is someone else.

Then Quetta Press Club President Shahzada Zulfiqar called on the government to clear the confusion caused by the contradictory confessional statements by ordering a reinvestigation in the case.