Journalist escapes kidnap attempt in Islamabad

ISLAMABAD: A journalist said on Wednesday he had narrowly escaped being kidnapped by armed men.

Taha Siddiqui, who reports for France 24 and is the Pakistan bureau chief of Indian television channel WION, said the attempted abduction took place while he was being driven by taxi to the airport serving the capital Islamabad and the neighbouring  Rawalpindi.

"I was on my way to airport today at 8:20 am when 10-12 armed men stopped my cab & forcibly tried to abduct me.I managed to escape. Safe and with police now," Siddiqui tweeted from a friend´s Twitter account early in the morning.

"Looking for support in any way possible #StopEnforcedDisappearances," he added in the same tweet.

Rights groups have denounced the kidnappings of several social media activists over the past year.

Last year, five Pakistani bloggers went missing for several weeks before four of them were released.

Siddiqui spoke to Reuters from a police station where he was filing a report on the incident, and described how his taxi was stopped on the highway when another vehicle swerved, and braked suddenly in front of it.

About a dozen men armed with rifles and revolvers pulled him out of the cab, beat him and "threatened to kill" him.

"They threw me in the back of the vehicle in which I had been travelling, but the door on the other side was open," Siddiqui said.

"I jumped out and ran and was able to get into a taxi that was nearby, whose driver then floored it.

"When the taxi stopped, Siddiqui hid in a ditch for a while, he added.

Saroop Ijaz, a lawyer who works with Human Rights Watch, said Siddiqui´s kidnap attempt was worrying development and added that "violence and the threat of it are not legitimate means to deal with dissenting voices" in the country.