In a letter smuggled out of his cell, Rehmat Shah Afridi,...

In a letter smuggled out of his cell, Rehmat Shah Afridi, the former editor of the Frontier Post, said he was tortured and insisted his conviction on June 27 was politically motivated.
"I spent a good 17 days in Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) custody. They gave me electric shock, physical and mental torture," he wrote. Afridi is in jail in Lahore, convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to hang.Many Pakistani journalists and human rights organisations suspect Afridi's biggest crime was to cross paths with the authorities, particularly the powerful Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF).
Five months before Afridi's arrest in April 1999 the Frontier Post ran a report headlined "In cahoots with smugglers, ANF bosses give narco trade a new boost", which claimed the force was making money from drug trafficking. The newspaper followed up with similar reports, although the force denied the allegations.
"I know the ANF bosses are angry with me because I published a few big stories with 100 per cent proof against them," Afridi said.
His paper also accused the then prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, of massive corruption, a claim now widely acknowledged as accurate. Sharif was overthrown in a military coup in October 1999, convicted of corruption and sent into exile in Saudi Arabia.
Even after the fall of Sharif's government, journalists in Pakistan remain under pressure to curb their criticism of the current regime and censor their own work.
"There is a fear around us," one senior Pakistani journalist said. "You have to be so careful what you write and the way you write it."
Pakistan's Human Rights Commission believes the military is trying to curb dissent. "The military mind is so convinced of its own infallibility that there is no possibility of a decent intercourse," said I. A. Rehman, the commission's director.