Photograph: Screenshot/ BLA video
A fresh wave of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances has been documented across Balochistan this month, as Baloch rights groups recorded the recovery of several bodies of men who had earlier been forcibly taken, and appealed once more to international institutions that have largely ignored the province.
The Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) reported on 14 June that 28-year-old Noshad Ahmed had been shot dead on 1 June on Chedagi Road in Panjgur by men it described as a "state-backed death squad", and that 18-year-old Irshad Alam, forcibly disappeared on 30 April, was found dead in the Basima area of Washuk on 8 June after weeks missing.
Days earlier, the bullet-riddled body of 19-year-old farmer Shabeer Ahmed was dumped in the same Washuk district, more than a month after he was taken on 27 April. The body of a 28-year-old man named Saddam was recovered in Turbat on 13 June, while the Baloch Voice for Justice reported that two students, 19-year-old Shukrullah and 20-year-old Zubair Baloch, were forcibly disappeared from Dalbandin on 4 June.
The BYC has accused personnel of the Frontier Corps of carrying out abductions without charge, holding detainees incommunicado, and later dumping their bodies, a pattern that has left families across the province searching morgues and roadsides for relatives.
The group's chief organiser, Mahrang Baloch, has insisted the movement remains non-violent in the face of the crackdown. "Baloch Yakjehti Committee was peaceful, Baloch Yakjehti Committee is peaceful, and Baloch Yakjehti Committee will continue to peacefully raise its voice against oppression, enforced disappearances and human rights violations in Balochistan," she said.
The killings documented by the BYC run alongside an armed insurgency in which the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), a separatist group fighting for independence from Pakistan, wages its own campaign. The BLA claimed a series of coordinated attacks on 13 June in which it said it had killed seven people it accused of informing for the military, among them alleged members of the same death squads the BYC condemns, and said a "Baloch National Court" had sentenced one man to death. Pakistani authorities did not respond to the claims.
The committee has repeatedly called on the United Nations and international human rights organisations to take notice of the killings, appeals that have so far drawn little response from a world that has treated the violence in the resource-rich province as an internal Pakistani matter.