Two Supporters of Former Prime Minister Imran Khan Have Been Disappeared Amid Pakistani Crackdown on Dissent
Last September, Muhammad Junaid Jahangir and Syed Salman Raza were detained by the UAE. Their families demand answers about their detention.
Two men linked to Pakistan’s major opposition party have been held without charge for more than seven months in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), after being detained by the UAE allegedly at the behest of the reigning Pakistani military. Muhammad Junaid Jahangir and Syed Salman Raza disappeared in the UAE, where both lived and worked, in late September 2024. Both men were once part of imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s digital media team, helping run social media accounts supporting his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI).
In 2022, PTI was removed from power by Pakistan’s powerful military, partly at the behest of the U.S. State Department. Since then, the military has relentlessly cracked down on Khan’s supporters, including through extrajudicial detention, kidnappings, torture, and even killing. Military officials have threatened the families of individuals living in Western countries, including by detaining and torturing their relatives in Pakistan as a means of blackmail.
Jahangir and Raza disappeared in September of last year from the UAE, according to their families. The disappearance of Jahangir and Raza suggests that the military’s campaign of transnational repression is expanding, as authoritarian governments allied with the Pakistani military allegedly cooperate with it to help suppress dissent globally.
“There have been threats of abduction against PTI activists abroad and it is well known that Pakistani military intelligence cooperates closely with the UAE,” said Azhar Mashwani, a PTI social media activist who knew the two detained men and has himself been previously arrested for his political activism. “They have been arrested and there is no legal remedy for them. No lawyer can access them, and no consular support or other basic information has been provided. Their families tried to hire a lawyer but were told that this is a national security issue and no one will handle their case.”
A year after Khan was removed from power in 2022 and the crackdown began, both men fled Pakistan. They escaped the dragnet and quietly rebuilt their lives in Dubai: Jahangir worked as a marketing manager in a private company, and Raza settled with his wife in a modest apartment in Sharjah. They kept low profiles and refrained from any overt political activity.
However, a government raid on the Islamabad offices of PTI last year exposed them to new scrutiny from the military. According to party members, their names were listed in internal databases of PTI social media volunteers, revealing them as activists working on behalf of the party to spread its message online.
Two months after the raid in the PTI Islamabad office, Jahangir went for a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. Upon his return to the UAE, he was detained at the airport by Emirati officials. According to his family, he was given no explanation for his arrest, and he was not allowed a phone call. When Jahangir’s family tried to contact Emirati authorities to learn more about his whereabouts, they would not provide them information or even confirm that he was in their custody. This stonewalling continued for months as Dubai police also refused to provide information about his arrest.
“After he was arrested, Salman’s wife went to a police station in the UAE to ask about his status,” said Mashwani. “They told her they can’t do or tell her anything, because whenever they put his ID number in their system a prompt comes up that says that this is a national security issue.”
When Jahangir’s sister flew to the UAE in November to try and get answers in person, she was told she might need a power of attorney from their mother in Pakistan to act on his behalf. Yet even that process was opaque. The UAE embassy offered conflicting instructions, and no department would confirm whether Jahangir had even been formally charged. The police repeated that his case fell under “national security” and that any legal process would be handled internally. The family was stuck in a perfect loop of helplessness: unable to retain a lawyer without knowing the charges, unable to get the charges without legal access, and unable to secure access without paperwork that no one would verify.
Raza’s story was similar. He was picked up from front of his apartment building three days after Jahangir. He similarly went missing without a trace or a charge, and his family assumed a connection between the two cases because of the similarities in how the men were taken and the timing of their disappearances. Both families were in the same predicament: the Dubai police would ask them to reach out via the Pakistani embassy, and the Pakistani embassy would refuse to provide consular assistance. Without any formal charge or acknowledgement from UAE authorities, the families could not seek legal recourse.
“I believed the UAE would be the safest place for him,” said Jahangir’s mother, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. “What happened to my son was beyond anything we could imagine. He was taken without any charges or warning, he simply disappeared.”
Eventually, through connections via PTI leadership, the families were able to find out that the two were being held by the SSA (State Security Apparatus), UAE’s secretive intelligence agency. They were told that the SSA does not disclose the whereabouts of detainees or issue formal arrest notices, instead operating under a sweeping mandate to investigate anything deemed a threat to “national security.” Since the Pakistani military has intelligence collaboration with the SSA, they were marked as threats and detained on behalf of Pakistani intelligence services.
Senior members of Khan’s party have sought to intervene with the UAE on their behalf, including by relaying messages to the UAE ambassador in Islamabad asking that the men, at minimum, be granted legal counsel. But according to their families, no progress has been made. No court dates have been set in their case, no charges have been disclosed, and they have still failed to find a lawyer in the UAE willing to take their case.
SSA authorities eventually started allowing a weekly phone call with the detained and their relatives. But in April 2025, that also suddenly stopped without explanation, alarming both families. The families were granted a brief call in June as proof of life but without any updates on their future legal status.
Brutal Crackdown
Since February 2022, the Pakistani security has kidnapped thousands of PTI activists and supporters of Khan. Many of them are social media activists who have been kidnapped and disappeared for as little as a single tweet against the military involvement in Pakistani politics. They have reported being tortured under custody, sometimes being forced to listen to the torture of family members over the phone by individuals working at the behest of the Pakistani security services, as in case of an Pakistani-Australian political activist who was forced to listen on the phone as his brother was beaten by state operatives; Drop Site News later obtained and published a recording of that call. What started as a US-backed, soft military coup in Pakistan has plunged the country into full-blown totalitarianism, with the repression now reaching far beyond Pakistan’s borders.
As Pakistan cracks down on dissent at home, it is increasingly leveraging its foreign alliances and intelligence-sharing agreements to target dissidents abroad. Its close ties with regimes like the UAE—built on decades of military, economic, and diplomatic cooperation—have created an enabling environment where political dissidents can be targeted far from home with little scrutiny and due process.
The UAE has become a major focal point of transnational repression in recent years, working with regional governments to crack down on dissent and to target dissidents in exile. The Emirati government recently worked with Lebanon to detain and extradite a prominent critic from that country and bring him back to the UAE to face detention. The Emirates has also been implicated in other cases of arbitrary detention and torture targeting political opponents or individuals wanted by allied regimes.
Similarly, with global powers like the United States prioritizing transactional relationships with totalitarian regimes like Pakistan, instead of a minimal focus on democracy and human rights, it has become increasingly easy for states like Pakistan to act with impunity, both within and beyond their borders.
When Pakistan’s powerful Chief of Army Staff and the head of the military junta, Field Marshal Asim Munir, met with the U.S. President Donald Trump last month in an unprecedented lunch meeting, there were no reported mentions of human rights abuses in Pakistan, no questions about the mass detentions, no discussions of the shuttering of independent media, and no references made to the ongoing torture of political dissidents. Instead, the conversation reportedly centered on regional security, Iran, and Pakistan’s recent proposal to nominate President Trump for the Nobel Peace prize for brokering peace between India and Pakistan.
This is all because Imran Khan remained neutral on the Ukraine/Russia war. The US caused these "disappearances."
Hahaha 😂. Trump's Nobel Peace Prize!! For any American enabler of genocide, THAT would be the ultimate hypocrisy!