Mohammad Gohir Khan, the 31-year-old British man of Pakistani origin convicted of conspiring to murder Pakistani dissident blogger Ahmad Waqass Goraya in the Netherlands, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a UK court.
In January, Khan was found guilty of conspiring to kill the Pakistani blogger, who is in self-exile in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Waqass Goraya is an activist who left Pakistan several years ago after he and five other bloggers were abducted, and allegedly tortured by their captors, in Islamabad in 2017.
In the transnational scheme to kill the blogger, Khan, who was a heavily indebted supermarket worker, was offered £100,000 by a shady, Pakistan-based middleman known only as Muzamil, according to prosecutors. It is unclear who Muzamil was working for, but UK police have appealed to the public for any information on the individual.
Khan accepted the middleman’s offer. He travelled from east London to the Netherlands on a Eurostar train to commit the crime. He spent days casing Waqass Goraya’s home in Rotterdam, and bought a professional chef’s knife he planned to use in the murder, the prosecution claimed.
Eventually, Khan realized the blogger was not home, so he made his way back to the UK, where he was arrested upon his return.
Khan will serve 13 years in prison before he is eligible to apply for parole.
In a statement about the verdict, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said, “We welcome the jury decision in this case, which is a rare step towards establishing criminal accountability for transnational crimes against journalists. Far too often exiled journalists are forced to live in fear in the face of continued threats from the countries they escaped.”
