ISLAMABAD, March 15: Pakistan People’s Party chairperson Benazir Bhutto has condemned alleged victimisation of a Lahore-based weekly and called upon Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali and provincial Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervez Elahi to look into the matter and provide security to the press.

Ms Bhutto urged human rights organizations, professional organizations of journalists and members of intelligentsia to raise their voice against what she called the high-handedness of the government. “As far as the PPP is concerned it will continue to fight for the protection of press freedom.”

In a statement issued here on Saturday she said that “national interest” was being advanced by the very government which had compromised it by undermining the Constitution, human rights and economic rights of the people of Pakistan.

She said that national interest was determined by a sovereign parliament. “An independent and free press is a pillar of state’s stability and an absolute national interest,” she said.

She also asked the government to desist from employing state agencies against independent journalists and media.

Editor of a weekly, Mr Amir Mir, in an open letter addressed to the authorities in the latest issue of the journal has alleged that Punjab’s Home Secretary and a former head of ISI in Punjab Brig (retd) Ejaz Hussain Shah has been threatening him and the weekly’s management.

According to the Editor, the home secretary had warned him that the paper was “working against national interest”.—Reporter