Friday, September 18, 2009

Mazhar Abbas TV Journalist

Mazhar Abbas is a well-known champion of press freedom in Pakistan who has worked as a journalist for 28 years and has endured repeated threats as a result of his work. He is the director of ARY News, an Urdu language channel is the first 24-hour news channel from Pakistan and secretary-general of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists.

In May 2007, he was one of three journalists who found bullets in white envelopes attached to their cars when they came out of a late night meeting at the Karachi press club. He was on the hit list of the Mohajir Rabita Council, an ethnic political group in Pakistan's southern province of Sindh. Abbas was also charged by police in 2007 after protesting the closure of three independent TV channels for reporting on anti-Musharraf demonstrations.

As an AFP correspondent in Karachi , he covered the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal South Asia Bureau Chief Daniel Pearl in 2002, and the following investigations and trials. (Source:www.cpj.org)