Instead of its mandated six weeks, it took the five-member inquiry commission six months, 23 meetings, and 41 depositions to present its findings. But, as expected, in its 146-page report, which was forwarded to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on Jan. 10, the commission says it still does not know who killed journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad.

Shahzad, a reporter for the Asia Times website, was abducted from Islamabad on May 29, 2011, on his way to a TV studio. His bruised, dead body was found two days later in a canal in Mandi Bahauddin. The commission describes Shahzad’s fate as “gruesome” and says his murder has to be viewed “in all probability” with the war on terror as background. “As an investigative reporter, Saleem’s writings probably did, and certainly could have, drawn the ire of all the various belligerents in the war on terror,” it notes, referring specifically to “the Pakistani state, the nonstate actors such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and foreign actors.”

In the face of overwhelming circumstantial evidence implicating the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate in Shahzad’s murder, four of the commission’s six executive-summary recommendations propose bringing the ISI under better control. The commission—which consisted of Supreme Court justice Saqib Nisar, the chief judge of the Federal Shariat Court, inspector-generals of Islamabad and Punjab police, and the president of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists—has expressed hope its findings would be “shared with all concerned” and “considered honestly and seriously.”

The commission suggests that the “balance between secrecy and accountability in the conduct of intelligence gathering be appropriately readjusted, with the aim of restoring public confidence in all institutions of the state”; that the ISI and Intelligence Bureau “be made more law-abiding through a statutory framework ... their interaction with the media be carefully, institutionally streamlined and regularly documented”; that the “agencies be made more accountable through effective and suitably tailored mechanisms of internal administrative review [and] Parliamentary oversight”; and that “a forum of Human Rights Ombudsman be created for judicial redressal of citizens’ grievances against [the] agencies, particularly the grievances of the press against attempts to intimidate, harass and harm them.”

The reaction from the journalist community has been one of intense disappointment: the commission’s report gives a clean chit to Shahzad’s murderers and instead blames the victim. One commission member, PFUJ’s Pervaiz Shaukat, told an audience in Islamabad toward the end of the commission’s work that the journalists who could have given damning evidence either absented themselves from the inquiry or submitted statements that refrained from deposing against the ISI, the main accused in the case.

It was known from the start that the commission would not be able to nail the killers. After all, a number of cases where the ISI was accused by journalist-victims of physical torture had come to nothing in the past. One commission witness was Umar Cheema of The News, who had dared to make his 2010 encounter with ISI’s goons public. His brave disclosure led foreign media institutions to lionize him, resulting in his isolation at home. The power of intimidation by the state—of a piece in its method with the techniques of persuasion of Al Qaeda and the Taliban—is irresistible in Pakistan. The commission interviewed officials of the ISI and, weighing their submissions against those of others, apparently found them more convincing.

The ISI told the commission that Shahzad kept his contact with them to the last, which, they said, proved he did not feel threatened by the agency! Their assertion that Al Qaeda could have killed Shahzad was backed by their taped conversation with another journalist, Hamid Mir, who “condemns Saleem Shahzad [as] being a dubious case [and] laments Americans for their extraordinary interest in this case.” The ISI sought to prove that Al Qaeda commander Ilyas Kashmiri and his agents, whom Shahzad’s reports revealed as his main sources of information, could have killed him.

The commission could have ignored this self-exoneration. In his deposition, Ali Dayan Hasan, who represents Human Rights Watch in Pakistan, said Shahzad “had been threatened by the ISI at the Oct. 17 meeting at ISI headquarters in Islamabad with the director-general of the media wing of the ISI, Rear Adm. Adnan Nazir, and another ISI official, Cmdr. Khalid Pervaiz.” Hasan says Shahzad took Admiral Nazir’s parting comments—“I must give you a favor. We have recently arrested a terrorist and recovered a lot of data, diaries and other material during the interrogation. The terrorist had a hit list with him. If I find your name in the list, I will certainly let you know”—as a threat.

Admiral Nazir has denied ever threatening Shahzad. It is interesting that the admiral—who is said to have since been removed from his job—had repeated the same threat, phrased in the same manner, to Imtiaz Alam, secretary-general of the South Asian Free Media Association, who in his submission to the commission stated: “Although the ISI denied the allegation, fingers were raised against the agency, which the deceased had himself blamed in case of possible harm. The suspicion about ISI’s involvement might not have held ground had the same officer not made threatening calls to various journalists, including myself, regarding their views/reports which he thought to be inimical to Pakistan’s interests.”

Some background events that have been obfuscated by the lateness of the commission’s work should be kept in mind. On May 2, Osama bin Laden was killed by the Americans in Abbottabad. Instead of ganging up with Pakistan’s Army in intense reaction against the U.S., Al Qaeda decided to attack Karachi’s Mehran naval base on May 22. Shahzad reported on the attack, and said it was triggered by the Navy not releasing a group of officers arrested on the suspicion of being Al Qaeda members.

Before the commission, the ISI fully exploited the anti-American ambience it orchestrated after Abbottabad. A brigadier asked the commission: “Why in this case from President Obama to every man worth a name in the U.S. felt disturbed. Was [Shahzad] a pawn who could be used at [an] appropriate time to further … U.S. objectives and create a wedge between [the security] establishment and other segments of society?” He added: “Though I do not have any concrete evidence, but Saleem Shahzad in my presence stated that he was approached by Indian intelligence agency RAW and now he has to present a paper in the U.K. on which he wanted the input of the ISI. He also stated that he is in contact with [an] intelligence agency in the U.K.”

Dexter Filkins wrote in The New Yorker in September: “The first order to harm Shahzad was issued shortly after his article on the Mehran attack appeared. The initial directive was not to kill him but to rough him up, possibly in the same way that [Umar] Cheema had been dealt with. But a senior American official confirms that, at some point before Shahzad was taken away, the directive was changed. He was to be murdered. Five weeks after the killing, Adm. Mike Mullen, the [then] chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said publicly that it had been ‘sanctioned by the government’ of Pakistan. In fact, according to the American official, reliable intelligence indicates that the order to kill Shahzad came from a senior officer on [Pakistan Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani’s] staff. The officer made it clear that he was speaking on behalf of [Kayani] himself. ([Maj.] Gen. Athar Abbas, the spokesman for the Pakistani Army, called this allegation ‘preposterous.’)”

Najam Sethi, editor of The Friday Times, told the commission: “I can personally vouch that Saleem Shahzad was one of several Pakistani journalists on the ISI’s list of troublemakers.” Sethi said fear stalks Pakistan’s free media, which is caught in various sectarian, ethnic, Taliban and agency cross-fires. “On top of that is the plunging credibility of the armed forces and their intel agencies in the eyes of Pakistanis and a desperate bid by them to halt the slide by silencing civilian dissent,” he said. “Unfortunately, however, the Zardari government is too weak or scared to do anything about it while the opposition is too scattered and divided to speak with any authority on the subject beyond the obligatory press release and prayer.”

The chapter on another death is thus closed. Shahzad joins a host of journalists who died in Pakistan’s killing fields. Their killers lost without a trace.