Journalist Asad Toor is safe after a deadly and suspicious attack-like traffic accident in the federal capital Islamabad on Friday.
Asad Ali Toor, a critic of Pakistan’s government and the military establishment, posted a video on his Twitter account, saying that he was safe after a deadly road accident. In the video, Toor says that he was cruising along 7th Avenue when he was hit by another vehicle. Toor’s car flipped multiple times before stopping on the pavement. Miraculously, Toor survived the incident with a few minor injuries and bruises.
Toor said that the vehicle that hit him had two men in it. He said that the men were hesitant to identify themselves and one of them made multiple false claims, initially saying that he was from Gujrat but then changing it to Canada. The two men were brought to the G9 police station where one of them, the driver, was identified as an Afghan immigrant.
Toor said that the incident initially looked like a deliberate attack, but the subsequent investigation and CCTV footage hint that it was an accident.
It should be noted that Asad Ali Toor was also attacked in May 2021 by armed assailants at his apartment in the federal capital. He was bound, gagged and badly beaten up. Toor said his assailants identified themselves as intelligence personnel and attacked him for his criticism of the military establishment.
Toor is among the few journalists who have reported, at the expense of their safety, on the plight of Baloch students enrolled in different academic institutions across Pakistan. He has interviewed Baloch student leaders who held frequent protests in front of the National Press Club in Islamabad against the “enforced disappearance” of their fellow students. Toor has also covered the protests and sit-ins by the families of the Baloch missing persons in Islamabad.
It is a journalist rule of thumb among the journalist community of Pakistan that reporting on Balochistan is a dangerous venture. Some learned that the hard way, like the prominent journalist Hamid Mir who survived a deadly attack in 2014 after inviting Baloch human rights activists Mama Qadeer Baloch and Farzana Majeed on his show, Capital Talk. Mir still has three bullets lodged in his body which he says are “souvenirs” of his work.