The house of Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin, the couple who run The Friday Times newsweekly out of Lahore, was invaded on 8 May by men claiming to be from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), even though many of them were in Punjab Police uniform. They beat up the private security guards, locked jugnu Mohsin in the bathroom and took away Najam Sethi without indicating charges.
The next day, Asma Jehangir, the well-known human rights lawyer, approached the Lahore High Court on behalf of Jugnu Mohsin and was reported to have called the event a kidnapping by the state. The Lahore High Court directed the government to explain itself (but did not order it to produce the detainee). The advocate general of Punjab pleaded ignorance of the whereabouts of Sethi. Meanwhile, the federal government in Islamabad stated that the arrest had been made "in connection" with the report the Pakistani high commissioner to India had given on Sethi's speech in Delhi (see following pages). Subsequently, an interior ministry spokesman admitted that Sethi was in the custody of the ISI, whereupon it argued that since the ISI is a military agency, Sethi cannot be produced before a civilian court in a habeas corpus petition.
Such explanations apart, it is clear that what Najam Sethi said in Delhi before an India International Centre (IIC) crowd had very little to do with his being picked up. His address described Pakistan's ideological, economic, legal crises no better or worse than the daily debates in Pakistan's English-language editorial pages, and much of what he had said had already come out in his editorials, and in particular, at an address before the National Defence College earlier in the year.
The real reason can be traced tothe fact that The Friday Times has been stubbornly focusing on the financial shenanigans of the ruling Sharifs clan of Prime Minister Nawaz and his brother, Shahbaz, the chief minister of Punjab —unrepaid loans being the principal embarrassment. Najam Sethi had also given an interview to the BBC team preparing a documentary on the Sharifs. (Two other journalists who have spoken to the BBC have also been harassed: Imtiaz Alam of The News daily had his car set on fire, and Hussain Haqqani, also of The Friday Times, has been arrested. The magistrate's report said that Haqqani bore the marks of a beating.)