Being muzzled is a very frustrating experience for a journalist. When the story broke last week that Sean Langan had been kidnapped in a remote region of Pakistan — he was released on 21 June after a long and tortuous negotiation — I got a stream of email messages from mutual friends saying, ‘Did you know about this?’ I wanted to respond by saying, ‘Of course I f***ing did.’ For the three months of Sean’s incarceration I had barely been able to think of anything else.
On reflection, though, it was a perfectly reasonable question. If I had known about it, why hadn’t I told them? More importantly, why hadn’t I written about it? Surely, if your best friend is kidnapped, the first thing you do is kick up an almighty stink in the media in the hope of putting pressure on the powers that be to secure his release?
Sean, too, was thinking this.
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