After publishing articles that some people in the local Pakistani community didn’t agree with — including a column by the president of the American Jewish Congress — the editor of an Urdu-language newspaper based in Queens said he has been dealing with something he thought he left behind 20 years ago when he sought political asylum in New York.

“I believe we are under siege right now,” the silver-haired editor of the weekly Pakistan Post, Mahammad Farooqi, said at his small office in the Jamaica section. “It feels like I am again in Pakistan.”

Starting last Wednesday, a group of people has been going to every distribution point in the city — mostly Pakistani grocery stores and restaurants — and disposing of the newspapers, Mr. Farooqi said. He estimates the number of copies lost to be about 10,000.

One day last week, he was approached by two men on Coney Island Avenue who told him that he and his family were at risk if he didn’t stop printing certain kinds of articles.

“As a newspaperman, I laughed,” he said. “People who want to kill you don’t talk.”

When he arrived home in Suffolk County, he said he was startled by a sound from behind him: It was the same two men in a Pathfinder, smiling.

“Now, I’m scared,” he said.

Police detectives are investigating the disappearances and the threats, a spokesman, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, said.

“We assigned a fluent Urdu speaker to the case,” Mr. Browne said. “We brought the complainant into headquarters to pursue the investigation.”

Newspapers have disappeared in the past, but Mr. Farooqi said the situation has gotten worse in the last months as he pushed on the boundaries of what is traditionally covered in his newspaper, which has correspondents in Washington, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, and parts of Canada.

About eight months ago, Mr. Farooqi gave the president of the American Jewish Congress a weekly column, which eventually became bi-weekly, in his English-language supplement. Next, he interviewed the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman.
“They’ve called me a Jewish agent … that I was bribed by the Jewish lobby,” Mr. Farooqi said.

The trouble escalated further last week after he and his counterpart at a competitor newspaper, the Urdu Times, published articles alleging corruption in the administration of the Pakistan Independence Day Parade. The Urdu Times is also seeing its newspapers disappear of late, the editor, Khalil Il-Ur-Rehman, said.

Mr. Il-Ur-Rehman said that some people with criminal records were refusing to leave the organization despite by-laws prohibiting people with criminal records, religious figures, and newspaper publishers from being trustees.

At the heart of the alleged corruption, according to stories published in both newspapers, is a prominent Muslim leader, Imam Hafiz Sabir of the Makki Mosque in Brooklyn.

Imam Sabir last night said he was “not involved with any of these activities, period.” He said the influx of holiday visitors likely was the cause of the sudden increase in the number of newspapers taken from distributors.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is working with the police department, a coordinator, Maria Salazar, said. In April, a columnist for the Pakistan Post in Toronto, Jawaad Faizi, was attacked by two men with cricket bats after he drove up to a colleague’s house, the Toronto Star reported. The men smashed his windshield and he was cut on the arms, shoulders, and face. They allegedly yelled at him to stop writing columns about Idara Minhaj-ul-Quran, an Islamic organization that he had criticized.

Support is not uniformly on the side of the newspapers, according to one observer.

“Almost everybody I know of have condemned the newspapers,” the president of the Pakistan League of America, Shafi Bezar, said. “Newspapers are expressing certain opinion, but I say: ‘Don’t throw it, when you throw you are taking the rights of other people.'”

The president of the American Jewish Congress, Jack Rosen, said the antagonism was likely the work of a small group of people in the community.

“If it’s true, it’s unfortunate,” Mr. Rosen said, speaking from Moscow. “I don’t think that attitude is prevalent in the Pakistani-American community.”

As of yesterday evening, this week’s editions of the Pakistani Post and Urdu Times had yet to reach the newspapers’ offices, which are next door to each other. Mr. Il-Ur-Rehman, drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, said he had attempted to broadcast a message to whoever was getting rid of the newspapers.

“If today’s papers stay on the stands, I’ll meet with them,” he said. Across the room, Mr. Farooqi argued: “We can’t let them do this. There is procedure.”