Shaheen Sehbai

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Shaheen Sehbai is a Pakistani journalist and the current Group Editor of daily English newspaper The News International.^[1] He has also worked as a reporter for the Dawn newspaper in Washington D.C. and then later was became the editor for The News International in Islamabad. But, he was forced to resign the post for not towing the line of General Pervez Musharraf government. However, recently he was again the made the group editor (senior most editor) of the second largest English daily The News.

On February 16, 2002, Sehbai let a story run that exposed government Pakistani ties with terrorist bombings in India (a story that also ran in The Washington Post and The International Herald Tribune by the work of the reporter, not Sehbai). The government immediately stopped its advertisements in The News International, and put inordinate pressure on the company to fire those involved in the creation and publishing of the story.

Because of the Daniel Pearl situation at the time, the Pakistani government was anxious to crush any rumors of connections to terrorism, and made a great deal of effort to censor any reporting that would suggest them. The News International was under constant pressure to tone down any stories that might show any sort of government corruption, and Sehbai had repeatedly fallen into trouble or punishment for running exposes. After the February 16th article, though, the government forced Sehbai to resign through immense financial pressure on The News International, and Sehbai was later accused of Arm Robbery by an employee of the Pakistan army headquarters. He eventually left for the United States, an expatriate out of disgust for the Musharraf government. Mr. Sehbai returned to America and started a web based newspaper, The South Asian Tribune in which he reported many cases of government and military corruption under Pakistan's Musharraf administration. In 2005 he announced that he was closing The South Asian Tribune after three years of service.