This article is more than 7 years old

This article is more than 7 years old

A popular Pakistani television journalist who incurred the Taliban's wrath by criticising it for trying to assassinate the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai vowed on Monday to continue "speaking the truth" after a bomb was found planted under his car.

Police in Islamabad said the remotely controlled device was defused by bomb experts. It was discovered shortly after Hamid Mir, one of the country's best-known television presenters, returned to his parked vehicle from a hair appointment.

"This was a highly sophisticated device containing around half a kilogramme of high explosives," said Bani Amin Khan, Islamabad's inspector general of police, who was in no doubt that the bomb could have killed.

"It was in a metal box attached by magnets to the bottom of the car, under the seat where Mr Mir usually sits."

Although bombings and assassinations by militant groups are a near daily occurrence in Pakistan, car bombs are rare.

The drama on Islamabad's suburban streets played out on Geo TV, the hugely popular private channel that employs Mir as one of its star political talkshow hosts.

Rehman Malik, the country's interior minister, rushed to Mir's house and promised television viewers that the celebrity presenter would receive all the police protection he required.

Mir already has three police guards, who have been provided by the government for the past few months. Khan said one of the guards spotted the box under the car, which was given away by a piece of plastic bag trailing out of it.

No group has yet taken responsibility for planting the bomb, although Mir reportedly received threats from the Taliban earlier this year following the shooting of Malala, the 15-year-old girl who campaigns against attempts by militants to shut down girls' schools.

The attempt to kill Malala prompted a storm of outrage from a Pakistani media that is normally careful about directly criticising the Taliban and other militant groups.

On one edition of his show Capital Talk shortly after the shooting of Malala, Mir concluded his programme by pointedly saying he rejected the Taliban's claims that the attack on the schoolgirl was justified under Islamic law.

But some journalists said Mir had other enemies besides the Taliban. His programmes on Baluchistan, the province where the military has been accused of extra-judicial killings and "disappearances", are thought to have angered the country's powerful army establishment.

Mir's status as a hate figure for militants is a marked change from an earlier period in his career when he had a good working relationship with both Pakistan's military establishment and militant groups, becoming one of the few journalists to interview Osama bin Laden.

But in 2010 a tape recording of a conversation believed to be between Mir and a Taliban spokesman showed the journalist apparently urging the movement not to release a hostage who was later executed.

Although Mir has always strenuously denied his voice was on the tape, some of his colleagues in the media believe the row prompted him to join the country's embattled band of so-called media "liberals" who dare to criticise the security establishment.

Pakistan is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists, according to Reporters without Borders, which last month said eight journalists had been killed in Pakistan this year. In 2011 the country's spy service was implicated in the killing of the investigative journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad.

Another Geo TV star, the journalist Najam Sethi, is so fearful that his outspoken nightly commentary has made him a target that he rarely leaves his house and broadcasts from a special studio erected in a spare bedroom.

"We are with you Hamid!" Sethi tweeted to his tens of thousands of followers on Monday. "We must be strong [and] united. We will not be intimidated by state or non-state terrorists and extremists."