I remember the shock of seeing an AK-47 hanging from the shoulder of Hayatullah, a tribal journalist from North Waziristan. It looked like an ungainly appendage, which had no business being on the shoulder of a journalist. He said by way of explanation, "The government has told us it can't give us any protection against the armed groups, so we have to take care of ourselves." It was August 2005.
Hayatullah's brother, Ihsanullah, was accompanying him, and he too had a gun slung across his back. When Hayatullah drove us to his home from the Mir Ali bus terminal, his brother sat in the back of the rickety pick-up truck, on guard. All through that visit, the fear that he was a marked man was visible in Hayatullah's speech and action. We had hardly sat down for tea when he suggested we leave the house for the school he ran. It was "much safer" there, he said. From what? His answer was vague: "People know we are here." What people? "The people in the neighbourhood, the tribesmen," he said simply. Later that night, he received calls from others, "intelligence people", who wanted to know his whereabouts.
Hayathullah was abducted in January 2006. Six months later, he was found dead. His killers remain unidentified. The same year, his younger brother, Bashir Khan, was also killed, followed by the death of his wife in a bomb attack in 2007.
Hayathullah reported for the Urdu daily Ausaf, and freelanced for foreign news organisations. His abduction and death came after photographs he took proved that a US Hellfire missile had hit a target in North Waziristan. This contradicted the Islamabad government version that the attack had come not from American forces, but rather from Pakistani forces. But it was Hayatullah's regular reporting on the growing militancy and the 'war on terror' in the tribal areas that had him worried. "I think one day I'll be killed for my reporting," Hayat once told the writer Eliza Griswold, whom he helped to report from North Waziristan.