April 3, 2026
By Rehan Piracha
LAHORE
Police in Larkana have arrested an absconding suspect in the 2014 murder case of journalist Zakir Hussain Dahar, widely known as Shan Dahar, more than 12 years after his killing. The arrest came in the wake of an investigative report published in January that had identified serious flaws in the original murder investigation.
According to a statement issued by Larkana police on April 3, a police team arrested Irfan Brohi — a declared accused in the journalist’s murder — from the Daro Phatak area of Larkana. Brohi had been absconding since 2014.
The development follows a report published in January by Safe Journalism, operating under Free Press Unlimited’s A Safer World for the Truth initiative, titled Truth Denied: How Pakistani Authorities Built an Unsolvable Case, which examined critical failings in the investigation into Dahar’s murder.
According to the report, Dahar was shot on January 1, 2014, outside a local health clinic where he had been filming and taking photographs. After being shot, he was taken to a hospital in Larkana, where he was left unattended by doctors for more than nine hours before dying in the early hours of the morning.
His murder became emblematic of the broader problem of impunity for crimes against journalists in Pakistan.
Initially, police investigators appeared to make headway under the jurisdiction of the Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) in Larkana.
However, within a short time, authorities removed the murder charge and reclassified the incident as accidental death. The subsequent official investigation proved ineffective, and it remains unclear exactly why and when the murder charge was dropped.
The precise nature of and motive for the killing have since remained uncertain, with no meaningful conclusion to the case. Dahar’s killers had therefore evaded justice for more than 11 years before the latest arrest. Police ignored indications that Dahar had been working on a story relating to counterfeit drugs and the illegal selling of donated medicine. Additionally, investigators ignored the actual reason for Dahar’s death: medical negligence, the report said.
The charge sheet in the case had listed six accused persons: Zulfiqar Ali, Piyar Ali, and Faheem, while brothers Aamir and Irfan Brohi were declared absconders. A sixth accused, Nasrullah Tunio, was on bail. In 2018, a trial court acquitted Tunio but kept the case against Aamir Ali Brohi and Irfan Ali Brohi on file, pending their arrest and production before the court.
Lala Asad Pathan, Finance Secretary of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists and a senior journalist based in Sindh, told Voicepk that scores of journalists had been murdered in the province, yet their killers remained free.
“In Sindh, the influential landlords or business owners behind the killing of journalists — along with government and police officials — try to portray these killings as personal enmity in order to avoid linking them to the victims’ journalistic work,” he said.
Pathan noted that slain journalists had lost their lives for exposing corruption, misuse of authority, and bad governance. He added that in cases where arrests had been made, investigations were often so flawed that suspects were ultimately acquitted or released due to lack of evidence.
He cited the case of journalist Zubair Mujahid from Mirpurkhas, killed in 2007, as another example of unresolved impunity — a case that has never been solved. In 2023, leading press freedom organisations wrote to both the Prime Minister of Pakistan and the Chief Minister of Sindh, calling for a reinvestigation into Mujahid’s murder.
The Safe Journalism report noted that since 1992, at least 98 journalists have been killed in Pakistan, 41 of whom were murdered in direct relation to their work, making the country one of the most dangerous in the world for journalists. In 37 of those murder cases, no one has been held accountable, while only partial justice was achieved in the remaining four. Not a single case of journalist murder in Pakistan since 1992 has resulted in full justice.