The day after Khan's story was published, his car was run off the road and he was abducted by five armed men. Six months later, his body was found in a Miran Shah marketplace, handcuffed and shot in the head from behind. Although a Peshawar High Court Justice investigated Khan's disappearance and submitted his findings in August 2006, the results have never been made public. Khan's family, meanwhile, has always accused Pakistani intelligence officials of authorizing the detention and murder of Hayatullah Khan.

The State Department's 2006 Country Report on Human Rights Practices for Pakistan described the Khan murder delicately, indirectly implicating Pakistani officials, while denying the existence of the CIA's Predator drones:

"Colleagues suspected that authorities detained Khan after he contradicted a government report that the senior leader died when munitions exploded inside a house. Khan quoted local tribesmen as saying the house was hit by a missile fired from an aircraft."

Abu Hamza Rabia was the most prominent high-value al-Qaeda official killed in the early years of the CIA's killing-by-drone program over the tribal areas of Pakistan. Hayatullah Khan, meanwhile, was an unintended early casualty of the drone campaign, murdered for having the courage to report on the facts as he saw them, which directly contradicted the Musharraf government's sanitized version of the events.

The important work of Khan is worth remembering as the world awaits the results of a Pakistani judicial commission "for in depth probe of the mysterious assassination of journalist Saleem Shahzad," according to a Pakistan Supreme Court statement. Shahzad vanished on May 29, after reporting alleged connections between al-Qaeda and Pakistani Naval officials. His body was found two days later seventy-five miles south of Islamabad, the victim of torture before his murder. Shahzad had told colleagues for months that he received specific death threats from officials from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate.

Last week, Dexter Filkins reported that, according to an anonymous American official, "reliable intelligence indicates that the order to kill Shahzad came from a senior officer on General [Ashfaq Parvez] Kiyani's [Chief of Army] Staff." Filkins charges were, in part, confirmed by a remarkable mid-July press conference with Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen noted of Shahzad the "huge concern I've had with respect to both the disappearance and obviously finding him dead," adding that, "his isn't the first, it is- for whatever reason, it has been used as a method historically." When pressed whether the Pakistani government had authorized Shahzad's detention and murder, Mullen admitted: "Yeah, that it was sanctioned by the government, yeah."