Missing Baloch: Bodies dumped in Karachi

THE issue of missing Baloch people appears to be taking a worrying new trajectory — one that may be reflective of the air of impunity that law-enforcement agencies have for years been accused of by those who maintain that the missing are mainly in undisclosed custody. The wall of photographs at the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons camp outside the Karachi Press Club has become distressingly familiar. But on Saturday, two pictures were removed.
The bodies of Babu Iftikhar Baloch and Maqbool Ahmad Baloch, who disappeared on Jan 24 from near Karachi’s Baldia Town, had been found — they had been brutally tortured and killed. Sunday saw two more bodies of missing Baloch men — schoolteacher Abdul Rehman and student Zahid Hussain — found in the city’s suburbs. Their bodies bore strangulation marks and the men had been shot in the back of the head. The VBMP’s Abdul Qadeer Baloch (who started the camp after losing his son in a similar tragedy in 2011) maintains that so far the bodies of 11 missing Baloch have been found dumped in various Karachi areas.

It is imperative that the state and administration adopt greater urgency in bringing this issue to a resolution, once and for all. The Baloch are not the only ones at the receiving end of a suspected ‘kill and dump’ approach; similar allegations are levelled with regard to the militancy-hit zones in the northwest. Persistent inquiry by judicial and other quarters, though, has proved instrumental in the provision of answers in some cases. Just last month, for example, the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances managed to trace 19 of the hundreds of missing people that it is looking for. Greater urgency needs to be brought to bear on the issue of the bodies of missing Baloch being found in Karachi, too. Those responsible for these and other cases of disappearances, torture and killing cannot be allowed to operate with such impunity.


Source http://dawn.com/2013/03/12/missing-baloch-bodies-dumped-in-karachi/