Masood Ahmed Janjua was a Rawalpindi-based businessman, who disappeared on July 30, 2005. Janjua and a friend, Faisal Faraz, boarded a private bus to travel from Rawalpindi to Peshawar, but never made it to their destination and disappeared without a trace.

He was born on September 25, 1961, in Rawalpindi, from where he acquired his school and college education. Janjua then moved to Karachi, where he enrolled in an institute for merchant navy professionals. He moved to the UK in the early eighties, where he spent around four years and completed various IT-related courses.

On his return, he first opened an art gallery in Islamabad. A couple of years later, he switched tracks and started a travel agency in Rawalpindi. It was while running the gallery that he met his spouse, Amina and, after their families got involved, they married in June 1989. The couple had their first child, a boy, a year later, and had two more children.

The man who disappeared without a trace…

A decade later, Janjua branched out into education, opening two institutes: an IT institute in Rawalpindi and a fashion design institute in Islamabad. His wife took over the two institutes after his disappearance, but couldn’t sustain them, and they were shut down by 2013.

In the meantime, he shut down his travel agency in Rawalpindi, and started another, Vital World Travels in Islamabad, which is still run by his partners.At the same time, he was engaged in welfare activities with a local charity, the Hamza Foundation, which held relief camps in areas of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa that were wracked by militancy.

His wife tells Eos that her husband was a patriotic Pakistani who was critical of the policies of Gen Pervez Musharraf, who was the president and the army chief at the time of her husband’s disappearance. The couple performed haj in 2000, after which, says Amina, her husband made sure that he didn’t miss any of the five daily prayers.

Janjua’s case became an international issue in 2006, after the then chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, took suo moto notice of the case. In 2009, a witness by the name of Imran Munir recorded a statement in front of a joint investigative team that he saw Janjua at a detention centre near Rawalpindi, between 2006 and 2007. The witness later claimed asylum in a refugee camp in Sri Lanka.

In 2011, the government told the Supreme Court that Janjua and his friend had been killed by members of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, because they thought the two men were double-crossing them. Amina rejected the government’s claim.

Since then, there has been no further information on Janjua and his friend’s whereabouts.

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 28th, 2024