By Staff Reporter
PESHAWAR: Masked gunmen opened fire on a provincial minister’s car and dragged him away on a Pakistani motorway in broad daylight, in an incident that has plunged the country’s restive northwest into a fresh political turmoil and will now be examined by judges after his family went to court demanding his return.
Fazal Shakoor Khan, minister for public health engineering in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has not been seen since Monday afternoon, when his vehicle was intercepted as he travelled from his home district of Charsadda towards Peshawar to attend a session of the provincial assembly. His driver, Qaiser Khan, and a police constable travelling with him, identified as Mujahid, also disappeared and remain unaccounted for.
Footage that circulated widely on social media on Monday showed several masked men, some in black uniforms and others in plain clothes, surrounding the minister’s moving car. One is seen wrenching open the driver’s door while another fires repeatedly at the tyres. The vehicle was later found abandoned near the M-1 motorway’s Peshawar toll plaza; of the minister and his two companions there was no sign.
The Peshawar High Court is now set to hear a petition, filed on Tuesday by the minister’s brother, retired Major Anwar Aziz, seeking an order for the authorities to trace and produce him. A division bench of Senior Puisne Judge Ijaz Anwar and Justice Kamran Hayat Miankhel will hear the case on Wednesday.
The petition, lodged through advocate Bashir Khan Wazir, calls on police and other law enforcement agencies to recover the minister and asks the court to direct Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s inspector general and Peshawar’s capital city police officer to establish a high-level inquiry into the episode. It names the provincial police chief, the city police officer, the senior superintendent of police for Peshawar operations and other officials as respondents. Crucially, it asks that if Shakoor Khan is found to be in the custody of any state institution, he should be brought before the court and freed unless his detention can be shown to be lawful — language that reflects longstanding disquiet in Pakistan over enforced disappearances carried out by security agencies rather than ordinary criminals.
A separate criminal case has been registered at Chamkani police station, also on the family’s complaint, invoking section 365 of the Pakistan Penal Code, which covers kidnapping and abduction.
The disappearance has convulsed a province already on edge. It came only a day after another Khyber Pakhtunkhwa minister, Shakeel Khan, who holds the communications and works portfolio, said he had come under attack in Batkhela and only narrowly escaped after an exchange of gunfire — prompting an emergency, late-night sitting of the provincial assembly on Monday at which the Speaker, Babar Saleem Swati, demanded that federal officers serving in the province be made to swear a loyalty oath. Home minister Tariq Saeed told the assembly he had instructed the provincial police chief to investigate the attack on Khan and to ensure an FIR was registered over Shakoor Khan’s disappearance.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s chief minister, Sohail Afridi, addressing reporters alongside senior figures from the governing Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, said plain-clothed men had opened fire on the minister’s vehicle before abducting him, and vowed the party’s momentum would not be broken. “If someone thinks such actions will cause the movement to fail, that will not happen,” he said. The assembly speaker went further, accusing the provincial police chief of misconduct and alleging that armed, masked men had been able to seize a sitting minister even with police present.
The province’s information minister, Shafi Jan, described the episode in a post on X as “a direct attack on the Constitution, law, democracy and public mandate”. “We will not be intimidated by such tactics,” he wrote. “Snatching away the right to peaceful political struggle is the height of fascism, but we will continue to fight for our rights while remaining within the bounds of the constitution and law.”
PTI’s Charsadda president and provincial assembly member, Arshad Umarzai, condemned what he called Shakoor Khan’s “arrest” as a failure of the provincial government, and said the party would set out its next steps at a demonstration held at Farooq Azam Chowk in Charsadda on Tuesday afternoon. Party workers, led by former district officials Aziz Khan and Gul Nawaz, also gathered to demand his immediate release, while separate protests took place in Malakand over the Batkhela incident.
No state agency has publicly acknowledged holding Shakoor Khan, and it remains unclear whether he was taken by official operatives or by unidentified non-state actors — a distinction that has fuelled speculation and anger among his supporters. His personal secretary, Alam Khan, said some of the men who blocked the car near the motorway exit had appeared to be wearing police uniforms.
The case lands amid a wider standoff between PTI and the federal government ahead of a planned march on Islamabad on 27 September. Party figures have linked the minister’s disappearance to a string of recent detentions, including that of Fatehul Mulk, a member of the provincial assembly picked up in Islamabad, and of Uzma Khan and Noreen Niazi, sisters of the jailed former prime minister Imran Khan, whose detention is being challenged separately in the Lahore High Court. Mr Afridi alleged the timing of the incidents, coming so close to the planned protest, was no coincidence.
Shakoor Khan, a lawyer by training, has represented Charsadda in the provincial assembly across four terms dating back to 2008, sitting first for the Awami National Party and later the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl before joining PTI ahead of the 2018 election. He was handed the public health engineering portfolio in October last year.
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