The kidnapped son of a Pakistani governor who was murdered for criticising blasphemy laws was freed on Tuesday, a week after his father’s killer was executed, authorities said.
Shahbaz Taseer, in his 30s, had been missing for more than four years since he was abducted from his car in Lahore, just months after his father, Punjab governor Salman Taseer, was killed in 2011.
The Pakistani army said Shahbaz Taseer had been rescued by intelligence agents in Baluchistan.
Last week, Salman Taseer’s former bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, was hanged for the murder. The killer’s funeral attracted tens of thousands of supporters who proclaimed him a hero for defending Islam.
Salman Taseer had spoken in support of a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy and had called for the laws that mandate the death penalty for insulting Islam to be revised.
After his death, Taseer’s family received multiple threats from religious hard-liners. Shahbaz Taseer was believed to have been originally kidnapped by the radical Islamist group Lashkar-e-Janghvi and later handed to al-Qaeda and then to the Pakistani Taliban, intelligence sources said.
It was not immediately clear who his captors were when he was freed, nor whether they were arrested or killed in the operation.
