Late journalist's keep tries to disrupt Balochistan meeting

KARACHI -- The keep of a late sports journalist tried to disrupt a conference on Baloch missing persons at the Karachi Press Club.

Nargis Khanum, who was a concubine of late sports journalist Ali Kabir, could not tolerate the truth being told about Balochistan's forced occupation by Pakistan.

Baloch historian Prof. Saba Dashtiyari was narrating the details when Khanum went up to the stage to strike him.

There are more than 1,000 involuntariy and enforced disappearances, locally called missing persons, in Balochistan. These people have been abducted by the Military Intelligence and its sister agency the infamous Inter-Services Intelligence for demanding independence of their homeland.

Khanum had a secret relationship with reknowned sports journalist Kabir, 73, who died in October 2006.

Khanum, who is originally from India and who came to Karachi in search of greener pastures many years after partition in the 1960s, was once associated with The Star evening tabloid in Karachi.

After great difficulty the organizers succeeded in prevailing upon Khanum to allow the meeting to progress.

"I have the right to expression," Dashtiyari insisted.

Khanum calls herself a supporter of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, whose chief Altaf Hussain is on record of calling the partition of the Indian subcontinent one of the worst tragedies in human history.

Millions of immigrants from India who were paupers there, got property and power in Pakistan's Sind province and for this reason call it Mumlikkat-i-Khudad or "a state given by God."