On July 23, 2020, two gunmen fatally shot Anwar Jan Khetran, a reporter for the local newspaper Naveed-e-Pakistan, while the journalist was traveling home on a motorcycle in Barkhan district of Pakistan’s southwest Baluchistan province. He is survived by nine children and a spouse, the journalist’s brother Ghulam Sarwar told CPJ.
Prior to his murder, Khetran posted on social media about alleged graft and human rights violations linked to the provincial food and welfare minister, Sardar Abdul Rehman Khetran. The journalist’s brother Sarwar filed a police complaint alleging that the minister’s bodyguards, Nadir Khan and Adam Khan, killed Anwar Jan Khetran with the minister’s involvement. Police then filed a first information report opening an investigation into the two bodyguards, but not the minister.
Sardar Abdul Rehman Khetran, who still held a ministerial position as of early 2025 following disputed elections in February, denied involvement in the killing.
Sarwar told CPJ that prior to the journalist’s murder, the minister and his associates threatened Anwar Jan Khetran by phone for his critical social media posts.
Shahzada Zulfiqar, a prominent Baluchistan-based journalist and former president of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists, and Adil Jawad, a journalist who investigates journalist murders in Pakistan as part of the A Safer World for the Truth Initiative, of which CPJ is a member, said that they believed Khetran was targeted over his social media posts about the minister.
In 2022, a Barkhan district court sentenced Adam Khan to life in prison for Anwar Jan Khetran’s murder. Nadir Khan remained at large as of early 2025, according to Sarwar, who said that authorities did not properly investigate the murder’s link to Sardar Abdul Rehman Khetran.
Baluchistan police chief Moazzam Jah Ansari and Sardar Abdul Rehman Khetran did not respond to CPJ’s requests for comment sent via messaging app in late 2024 and early 2025.