ISLAMABAD—A few days ago I spoke to the Pakistani attorney Samiullah Afridi over the phone, and he was worried. He had defended in court Dr. Shakil Afridi, the physician widely alleged to have fingered Osama bin Laden for the American hit team that killed the terrorist mastermind in 2011, and he felt ever more exposed as a target for Osama’s admirers.
Late last year, Samiullah Afridi (no relation to his client) quit the case reluctantly under a barrage of death threats targeting him and his family. On Tuesday he was shot dead as he returned to his home in Peshawar. A Taliban splinter group, Jundullah, claimed responsibility.
“It was not an easy decision to defend Dr. Shakil Afridi in the court,” Samiullah had told me when we talked on the phone. “I knew the consequences from Day One and don’t mind it,” he claimed.
But he soon spoke about the many troubles he’d encountered, and the many threats that he and his family had received not only from al Qaeda and the Taliban but, he believed, from the Pakistan’s intelligence agencies as well.
Read more
Prayers for this man and his family.
It is fairly common for lawyers of terrorist witnesses to be threatened.
In Saudi Arabia several lawyers who defended rape VICTIMS, and religious (non-Muslim) ”criminals,” even atheist bloggers have all been imprisoned and/or fined for defending such persons.
Often, in SA, when a defendant is found guilty of some weird Islamist ”crime,” his appeal leads to a harsher sentence and his lawyer is punished for aiding in the appeal process as well.