A Karachi court on Monday granted bail to journalist Farhan Mallick in a case pertaining to allegedly “anti-state” content as it accepted an appeal against an earlier order by a judicial magistrate, his lawyer said. Mallick, the founder of media agency Raftar, was arrested on March 20 in Karachi and booked under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (Peca) as well as the Pakistan Penal Code in a case related to alleged anti-state content on his YouTube channel. The arrest was met with widespread criticism from media bodies as well as rights activists.

“Farhan Mallick was granted bail in the case relating to Peca allegations on Raftar on Monday for a surety of Rs100,000,” the journalist’s lawyer Abdul Moiz Jaferii told. District Judge (East) Dr Chaudhry Wasim Iqbal heard the appeal against the March 28 trial court order denying Mallick’s bail plea, Jaferii said. The counsel further said that a separate bail  application in a case pertaining to alleged spoofed calls through a call centre was fixed for  hearing at 12pm at the Malir district court.

According to that case, the FIA team had raided an alleged call centre in Gulshan-i-Iqbal, where employees (agents) were found engaged in illegal activities involving spoofed calls through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) software. They allegedly contacted foreign nationals, falsely claiming to be representatives of the security department of Master and Visa banking systems, it added.

Mallick’s outlet Raftar hailed the bail in the Peca case as a “small victory in a long journey”. “We are now headed to Malir Court with [the] legal team for the second hearing — keep making dua; hope and resilience keep us going,” it wrote on X.

Credit: Independent News Pakistan (INP)