Karachi court grants journalist Farhan Mallick bail in case over alleged anti-state content: lawyer

A Karachi court on Monday granted bail to journalist Farhan Mallick in a case pertaining to allegedly “anti-state” content as it accepted an appeal against an earlier order by a judicial magistrate, his lawyer said.

Mallick, the founder of media agency Raftar and a former news director at Samaa TV, was arrested on March 20 in Karachi and booked under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (Peca) as well as the Pakistan Penal Code in a case related to alleged anti-state content on his YouTube channel.

The arrest was met with widespread criticism from media bodies as well as rights activists.

“Farhan Mallick was granted bail in the case relating to Peca allegations on Raftar today for a surety of Rs100,000,” the journalist’s lawyer Abdul Moiz Jaferii told Dawn.com.

District Judge (East) Dr Chaudhry Wasim Iqbal heard the appeal against the March 28 trial court order denying Mallick’s bail plea, Jaferii said.

The counsel further said that a separate bail application in a case pertaining to alleged spoofed calls through a call centre was fixed for hearing at 12pm at the Malir district court.

According to that case, the FIA team had raided an alleged call centre in Gulshan-i-Iqbal, where employees (agents) were found engaged in illegal activities involving spoofed calls through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) software.

They allegedly contacted foreign nationals, falsely claiming to be representatives of the security department of Master and Visa banking systems, it added.

Mallick’s outlet Raftar hailed the bail in the Peca case as a “small victory in a long journey”.

“We are now headed to Malir Court with [the] legal team for the second hearing — keep making dua; hope and resilience keep us going,” it wrote on X.

Peca and alleged call centre cases against Mallick

Mallick was handed into the Federal Investigation Agency’s (FIA) custody for four days a day after his arrest, following which he was sent to jail on judicial remand on March 25.

The next day, the FIA was given Mallick’s five-day physical custody in a new case pertaining to his alleged involvement in the theft of credit card data through “spoofed calls”.

On March 28, Judicial Magistrate Yusra Ashfaq had dismissed the senior journalist’s bail application. An appeal challenging that order was fixed for hearing on April 3 but was postponed till today as the FIA claimed not having knowledge of the hearing.

According to a first information report (FIR) dated March 20, the FIA had received a report about Raftar TV’s YouTube channel, which was “involved in running a campaign for the posting of anti-state videos targeting the dignitaries mentioned in violation”.

Mallick had been booked under sections 16 (unauthorised use of identity information), 20 (offences against the dignity of a natural person) and 26-A of Peca 2016, as well as sections 500 (punishment for defamation) and 109 (abetment) of the PPC.

Notably, Section 26A is among the provisions recently added to the Peca laws, wherein fake news is defined as any information about which a person “knows or has reason to believe to be false or fake and likely to cause or create a sense of fear, panic or disorder or unrest”.

Any person found guilty of spreading such information could be sentenced to up to three years in prison or fined up to Rs2 million, or both.

The criminalisation of online disinformation has spread fear in Pakistan, with journalists among those worried about the potentially wide reach of the law.