August 4, 2026
By Bismillah Jan
QUETTA
Right activists and journalists have accused the Balochistan government, and other authorities including law enforcement agencies, politicians, bureaucrats, and federal institutions, of being involved in pressurizing and silencing journalists and media workers across the province, through temporary abductions, detentions, notices, and legal cases.
In February this year, Shahid Rind, the aide to the Chief Minister of Balochistan on Media and Politics, addressed a seminar in Quetta and admitted that there were two cases of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016 (PECA) against journalists in the province. In both, he claimed, the provincial government was not the complainant.
The two cases he mentioned were those of Dawn newspaper investigative journalist, Akbar Notezai, and Farhan Malik, the head of a digital platform Raftar.
Rind said this just a week before he shared a letter on X (former Twitter) that was reposted by the CM Balochistan, Sarfraz Bugti, himself, in which authorities requested the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to prosecute an editor of a local newspaper, Agha Obaid, under PECA for sharing alleged corruption news on his digital page.
“Balochistan Government supports the freedom of the press, but it will take action against so-called social media pages on the character assassination of politicians and government officers under the guise of journalism,” Rind wrote on his X post.
“It is beyond my understanding how my personal details were openly shared by the chief minister office and information ministry,” says Agha Obaid who leads a multimedia digital outlet. “All of a sudden, the very next day, the police lodged an first information report (FIR) against me – and not because of some news report I did, but apparently for ‘blackmailing and threatening a government officer’. In fact, they would have raided my house too, but the next morning, I managed to acquire a pre-arrest bail.”
Agha says that he was threatened with arrest under 3MPO (Maintenance of Public Order), under which district administration can detain anyone for the duration of at least a month.
“My biggest crime is that I regularly highlight the corruption in government departments,” he emphasizes. “I know that I have been targeted because of my work.”
He adds that it is the government itself that creates suspicion by giving hype to a usual news report.
The Balochistan Union of Journalists (BUJ) has shown serious concern over the FIR against Agha. They expressed their condemnation in a press statement released soon after.
“We demand a transparent and impartial investigation that gives the YouTuber the full right of explanation,” it said.
A draconian law
The PECA Act was introduced to ‘regulate social media’ in 2016. It was amended by the Presidential Ordinance in 2022, and again amended in 2025.
But the media fraternity, journalists’ unions, and human rights groups have all expressed their concerns that it has instead been used against journalists or dissidents. Many journalists across the country have been booked and arrested under the Act. One of the victims of this Act in recent times was senior Islamabad based journalist, Fakhar ur Rehman, who was arrested in April 2026 over a single tweet.
Under the PECA Act, the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) was formally established in May 2024 to replace the FIA’s Cybercrime Wing.
NCCIA has been at the forefront of filing cases against critics of the government, also sent a notice to Akbar Notezai over his two-year-old investigative piece on the road of Buleda in Balochistan’s district Kech. The piece was published in Dawn on Aug, 26, 2024.
When Notezai was contacted his only response was a piece of advice: “Stay out of it”, he said, adding that Rind had claimed that it was not the government that was the plaintiff in his case, but a government officer in his personal capacity.
Notezai refused to comment on both this claim or the case.
However, Osama Altaf who was included in the FIR registered in the Hub district, against Farhan Malik and his team Raftar, has questions
“Ali Hassan Zehri was a minister when he registered a case against us,” he says. “Rind should be asked that if the provincial government is not endorsing this case, does this mean that the most powerful person in Balochistan is not a minister, or the chief minister – it is actually someone else?”
During the visit to Zehri’s constituency, we witnessed that he was notorious for lodging cases against his political opponents and journalists in the area,
“Our case is still in the Balochistan High Court, even though we have pleaded that this unlawful FIR should be quashed,” says Osama.
In February, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and 17 other media watchdogs demanded that the Prime Minister of Pakistan “urgently repeal or substantially amend (PECA) to protect press freedom and end its misuse against journalists.”
The statement also talks about how the Act violates the standards and criteria of the international standard for freedom of expression, and must be reformed to safeguard journalists’ constitutional rights and the public’s right to information.
The situation for Balochistan based journalists is tense and worrying – even though the province has the lowest ratio of PECA cases and complaints compared to other provinces according to data provided to the Senate Committee on May 6.
Saddia Mazhar, an Islamabad-based journalist, shared that there were two PECA cases and 134 complaints in the province. This data was before May, 2026, as three cases of PECA were registered in May against only one journalist.
The leadership of various journalist unions, including the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ), BUJ, and others have already declared the PECA Act a ‘black draconian law’.
In Quetta, they have announced a countrywide awareness campaign to engage all the stakeholders on the Act/
The aim is to prepare a draft with consensus to present it for the constitutional amendments in the parliament.
“PECA has now become a dreary and fearsome reality for journalists,” says an Islamabad based senior journalist. “We are working and demanding to revoke or amend it from the federal government, but until then we have to be extremely cautious when we have to write or say something.”
Temporary abduction
In the month of Ramzan, Maqbool Ahmad Jaffar, a podcaster who runs a digital page, was abducted by unknown persons for a short period of a few hours. He was later released without any legal charges. Jaffar claims that a bureaucrat had been involved in his arbitrary detention.
“When Imran Zarkoon was finance secretary, he recruited people in his department through artificial intelligence,” reveals Jaffar. “I raised the question on the transparency of the software, the entrance exam, and the company which was hired for the process.”
Jaffar said that the day after Zarkoon was posted was a principal secretary in the chief minister’s (CM) house, he began using the official things for personal interest.
“What happened to me could not have been possible without the consent of the CM; the government was directly involved in my case.”
He also claims that the law enforcement agencies were also being used indirectly for personal motives.
“What was the need of the involvement of the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD), Serious Crimes Investigation Wing (SCIW), or Intelligence Bureau (IB) in my case – am I a terrorist? Even my brother was abducted, treated, and interrogated like a “terrorist”.
Jaffar says that the allegations built against him would come under the cybercrime wing of FIA or NCCIA, but he believes that the bureaucrat deliberately wanted to teach him a lesson. He says that no official case was lodged against him and because of that it was possible that he could be filed under any other charges too – something he wrote about just before the incident.
“If a journalist in Islamabad, like Matiullah Jan can be booked in drug case, then someone living in a conflict zone like Balochistan can be easily charged with a terrorism case or even be portrayed as a terrorist. If the idea is established, then people will also accept it.”
Imran Zarkoon was contacted via WhatsApp about these claims but he did not respond to the allegations.
Maqbool Jaffar was picked up once again on the night of May 9, but was produced by noon in court by the NCCIA produced, where the agency declared that he had been arrested under Section 20 and 26-A of the PECA Act on the complaint of Babar Khan Yasenzai, a secretary of Communication and Works, of the Balochistan govt. The court handed over Maqbool to NCCIA for two days judicial remand.
In a statement, Shahid Rind clarified later that the provincial government had nothing to do with the arrest of the two social media activists, but did not take their names. He was referring to Maqbool Jaffar along with another individual Dr Sana, both of whom were booked under PECA, according to the spokesman of NCCIA.
“Two officers have filed the complaints on their own in one case, while the other case was registered at the request of a citizen,” Rind had said.
But the day when there was hope that Maqbool Jaffar would get bail, two new cases of PECA were slapped against him in court. According to Maqbool’s colleague, one case was registered on the request of the provincial minister of Food, Noor Muhammad Dummar, and another on the request of Imran Zarkoon who had been allegedly involved in his abduction too.
Notices
Habibullah, a journalist from Chaman, who has been residing in Quetta, received a notice on March 26, from the new agency of police to report to the Serious Crimes Investigation Wing for the investigation regarding a news report he had shared on his Facebook page.
“You are directed to report into office in two days, and give the reason, aim, and source of the information” mentioned in the notice obtained by Voicepk.
“First, I was asked about the source of the news story, I requested the legal notice, and I got it after an hour,” says Habibullah adding that due to the pressure he had to delete the news report from his digital page.
BUJ condemned the notice of SCIW and said that the agency could deny or confirm the authenticity of a news report, but it could not ask the reporter his sources. (The issue was later settled by the BUJ.)
Legal perspective
Journalists are not the only targets. A PECA case was also registered against a Quetta based lawyer and activist, Jalila Haider, who is now doing a PhD in the United States. Haider was targeted by the FIA Cyber Crime Wing, in April 2025 for allegedly glorifying and supporting Mahrang Baloch.
“In my case the State was the complainant,” she said. “They want to make me a test case and set an example for other dissidents and critics, for campaigning online over human rights and social justice causes.”
Jalila adds that a section in her FIR was also non-bailable as it was in the case of Imaan Mazari, an Islamabad-based lawyer who along with her husband Hadi Ali Chatta has been sentenced to 17 years in prison.
She condemned the role of the newly established cybercrime agency.
“The NCCIA was established not to counter cyber crime, online harassment, blackmailing, hate speech, and promoters of communal or religious hatred – but to silence human rights defenders, and journalists.”
Jalila adds, “Despite the existence of defamation law, they intentionally included the defamation clause in PECA under the guise of online space to protect those who misuse the power, to counter the right to information, and to curb free speech.”
She also criticised the role of journalists’ bodies for not raising the issue of Maqbool Jaffar.
“He is a full-time journalist, but I did not come across any statement from the journalists’ organisations not only in his case but also when Niaz Baloch, a social media activist from Mastung, was booked under the Anti Terrorism Act.”
“The State has repeatedly exploited PECA for its own benefit, which is to protect the status quo, and for the privilege of elites,” she says.