ISLAMABAD (AP) — A court in Pakistan’s capital sentenced seven people, including three journalists, two YouTubers and two retired army officers, to life imprisonment on Friday, after convicting them of inciting violence during riots in 2023 and spreading hatred against state institutions.
An anti-terrorism court judge, Tahir Abbas Sipra, announced the verdict in Islamabad after completing trials held in absentia.
None of the accused were present in court. They have been living abroad after leaving the country in recent years to avoid arrest.
Those convicted include former editor Shaheen Sehbai; two other journalists, Sabir Shakir and Moeed Pirzada; YouTubers Wajahat Saeed Khan and Haider Raza Mehdi; and retired army officers Adil Raja and Akbar Hussain.
According to the court order, the charges against the men stemmed from the violent unrest that erupted in May 2023 following the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan in a graft case.
At the time, thousands of Khan’s supporters attacked military installations, torched government property, ransacked the residence of a senior army officer and damaged the state-run Radio Pakistan building.
Khan was also indicted in 2024 on charges of inciting violence against military and government targets. He has denied the allegations. He was ousted from power by his political opponents through a no-confidence vote in Parliament in April 2022.
According to the prosecution, the seven men, who are known for publicly supporting Khan, had incited people to violence during the riots on May 9, 2023, when demonstrators targeted military installations, because Khan repeatedly blamed his removal on the United States and Pakistan’s military.
The U.S. government, the Pakistani military and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who replaced Khan after his ouster, have denied the allegations.
Sabir Shakir, who previously hosted a popular television program on ARY TV before leaving Pakistan, told The Associated Press on Friday that he was aware of his conviction in Pakistan. He said that he wasn't in the country when police accused him of encouraging mob violence.
“The ruling against me and others is nothing but a political victimization,” Shakir said. He said he traveled to Saudi Arabia before the riots for a pilgrimage to Mecca and later went to Britain, where he sought political asylum after concluding that he could face what he described as "fabricated cases," if he returned to Pakistan.
Shakir said that the court held the trial against him and the others without hearing arguments from his lawyer, and that he was handed two life sentences following the trial conducted in absentia.
The other convicted men couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
Under the court order, the seven men have the right to file appeals within seven days. The court also directed police to arrest them and transfer them to prison should they return to Pakistan.
Human rights defenders and representatives of journalists' unions say freedom of speech is shrinking in Pakistan, where the media have faced growing curbs in recent years. Sharif's government says that it supports freedom of speech, but that YouTubers and journalists should also adhere to basic ethics and journalistic principles.
FILE - Supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan take cover after riot police officers fire tear gas to disperse them during clashes, in Lahore, Pakistan, Wednesday, March 15, 2023. (AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary, File)
SIDON, Lebanon (AP) — Two years ago, Dr. Mohammed Ziara watched Israel ravage Gaza's health care system, shelling hospitals, striking ambulances and forcing patients to evacuate.
Now Ziara — along with many other medical workers, human rights groups and civilians — warns that the same scenario is unfolding in Lebanon.
Israel is pushing deep into the southern part of the country in its campaign against the Iran-backed group Hezbollah, a powerful militant force and political party that long has exercised de facto control over much of Lebanon’s Shiite community.
To describe its strategy in this war, the Israeli military has invoked the devastation it wrought in Gaza after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. At one point last month, Israeli warplanes even dropped leaflets over Beirut warning that after “great success in Gaza, a new reality is coming to Lebanon, too.”
“I've lived this before,” Ziara, a surgeon from Gaza City who specializes in burns, told The Associated Press on Thursday at the government hospital in the Lebanese port city of Sidon.
"I cannot go back to Gaza now,” Ziara said. “But I can be here, in Lebanon.”
As it did with Hamas in Gaza, Israel accuses Hezbollah of hiding in and operating from civilian areas, and using hospitals and ambulances for military purposes. Israel has increasingly targeted Lebanese first responders and medical centers, forcing several hospitals to evacuate.
“I was besieged in a hospital,” Ziara said of his time at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, where he worked before evacuating to Egypt with his family. He then joined the U.K.-based nonprofit Interburns, which sent him to Lebanon in 2024 to respond to the outbreak of the previous Israel-Hezbollah war. “I feel what these people feel.”
Since the war between Israel and Hezbollah reignited on March 2, Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 56 health professionals as of Monday, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
Israel has carried out more than 150 attacks against emergency medical workers and ambulances, and forced the closure of six hospitals and 49 health clinics through attacks or threats, the ministry reported. In the latest attack that killed two paramedics and seriously wounded a third early Monday, the ministry accused Israel of deliberately targeting a gathering of first responders on duty.
Ziara and his team from Interburns, which trains medics around the world in burn care, have set up the Lebanese public health system's first specialized burn unit — a critical resource in this crisis-stricken country where the war has killed 1,461 people and wounded 4,430, according to the ministry. Israel claims to have killed hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in the latest bombardment and ground invasion.
The Israeli military argues that Hezbollah’s use of medical facilities makes them legitimate military targets under international law. It does not offer evidence to support its claims.
Hezbollah denies conducting militant activities within civilian sites. Although the group's presence in residential areas is well-documented, there has been no independent verification of its use of hospitals for military purposes.
Based in the first city just north of Israel’s evacuation zone that covers nearly all southern Lebanon, Sidon Government Hospital takes more wounded people every day.
Kamal Fakih, 27, hates when people ask him what happened on March 17.
It’s not that it pains him to recall the Israeli airstrike. It’s that he doesn’t remember anything at all. He regained consciousness a day later at the hospital in Sidon, his body burned and cut by shrapnel.
Once stabilized, Fakih tried to connect with the paramedic who pulled him and his friend Hassan from the burning rubble, hoping to hear his account and thank him for saving their lives. But by the time Fakih got his contact, Muhammad Tafili was already dead, killed with a fellow paramedic in an Israeli airstrike on ambulances in the southeastern village of Kfar Tebnit on March 28, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.
That same day, Israeli attacks killed seven other medics across four additional villages, the World Health Organization said. Among the dead was a medic targeted while responding to an Israeli airstrike that killed three journalists working for pro-Hezbollah TV channels. Footage of the incident shows two strikes in quick succession — the first hitting journalists in their car, the second crashing into paramedics as they rushed to the rescue.
Israel's military accused the two medics, and two of the three journalists killed, of being Hezbollah operatives. Its claim alarmed watchdogs that witnessed similar justifications for killing more than 260 journalists and 1,700 health workers in Gaza, according to figures from the United Nations humanitarian agency.
Although Lebanese medical workers and journalists were killed during the 2024 war with Hezbollah, “this time is different,” said Ramzi Kaiss, the Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch.
He pointed to a startling promise by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz last week that Israel would flatten all the houses in southern Lebanon to protect its border towns from Hezbollah rockets “in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza” — two cities that Israel almost entirely razed in its offensive against Hamas.
“There’s a new kind of brazenness in declaring an intent to commit unlawful attacks,” Kaiss said. “It appears impunity has emboldened the Israeli military.”
Sweeping Israeli evacuation orders in recent weeks have sent over 1 million Lebanese flocking north. As the south came under heavy bombardment, clinics shuttered or suspended operations. Nabih Berri Hospital was swamped by an influx of casualties. To make room, it evacuated dozens of patients.
Such transfers involve coordination with the Lebanese army, Health Ministry and U.N. peacekeeping force — a game of telephone, doctors say, that creates potentially life-threatening delays. Admitting patients isn’t easy either; the Sidon burn unit must discharge a patient to free up a bed.
But the referrals keep coming, straining a health system already crippled by economic collapse.
“The health system is on its knees,” Ziara said, as the hospital was plunged into darkness until backup generators kicked in 10 minutes later, a result of Lebanon’s long-running electricity crisis. “Now front-line hospitals are lacking staff and supplies. They're overwhelmed.”
Lebanese civilians say that Israeli bombs often come without warning and hit indiscriminately, feeding a growing feeling that Palestinians in Gaza know well — that nowhere is safe.
Mohammad Qubaisi, 53, said his neighborhood of Zuqaq al-Blat in central Beirut had not received Israeli evacuation guidance before March 18, when Israeli munitions slammed into his seventh-floor apartment.
Carrying his wife from the smoldering ruins, he shouted for his sons. His eldest, Adam, called to him. But he couldn’t hear Jad.
Qubaisi ran back into the skin-searing steam to search for his 15-year-old. When he woke up at the hospital hours later, his face raw with second-degree burns, he knew his son was gone.
The Israeli military said it was targeting Hezbollah. Qubaisi pushed back.
“These are civilian buildings, not military targets. They hit us and we still don’t know why,” he said from the Sidon hospital. “We were sleeping safely in our home, and look what happened to us.”
A man with burn wounds from an Israeli airstrike on southern Lebanon undergoes surgery by Dr. Mohammed Ziara and his team, at the Sidon Government Hospital in Sidon, Lebanon, Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Displaced people who fled Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon sit inside tents used as shelters as a rainbow breaks through the rain in Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, March 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
A man with burn wounds from an Israeli airstrike on southern Lebanon lying in bed at the Sidon Government Hospital in Sidon, Lebanon, Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
A man with burn wounds from an Israeli airstrike on southern Lebanon lying in bed at the Sidon Government Hospital in Sidon, Lebanon, Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Smoke rises from Israeli airstrikes in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, April 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Mohammad Qubaisi, 53, with burn wounds from an Israeli airstrike on southern Lebanon, undergoes surgery by Dr. Mohammed Ziara, left, and his team, at the Sidon Government Hospital, in Sidon, Lebanon, Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
