22 April 2015

Balochistan: Enduring Tragedy

Ambreen Agha

On April 10, 2015, Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF) militants shot dead at least 20 Punjabi and Sindhi construction labourers at point blank range at their camp in the Gagdan area of Turbat District. Out of the 20 deceased labourers, 16 were Punjabis, and four were Sindhis from the Hyderabad District in Sindh. A senior administration official Akbar Hussain Durrani disclosed that the militants had lined the labourers up and shot them at point blank range after confirming their identity.

BLF 'spokesman' Goran Baloch claimed responsibility for the attack, asserting, “We will continue our fight against Pakistani occupation until (the) liberation of Balochistan.”

Retaliating to the killing, the Frontier Corps killed at least 13 BLF militants in a raid on April 13, 2015, including one key militant 'commander' Hayat Bewas in the same area. Leveling charges of extrajudicial killing on the SFs, leader of the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) Abdul Qadeer Baloch, also known as Mama Qadeer, at a Press Conference at the Karachi Press Club in Karachi, on April 16, 2015, claimed that five of the 13 suspects killed had been missing for some time. The claim leaves the incident shrouded in controversy. As SAIR has noted in the past,extrajudicial killings by state agencies have become a recurring problem in the Province.

The April 10 killing was the first incident of ethnic violence in Balochistan in 2015. There are, however, other precedents in the Province, such as the October 19, 2014, incident in which at least nine Punjabi poultry farm labourers were found dead in the Sakran area of Hub tehsil (revenue unit) in Lasbela District. Unidentified militants had abducted the 11 workers from a poultry farm in Sakran on October 18, 2015, and had killed nine of them after checking their identity cards. The remaining two were set free because they were from the Lasbela District of Balochistan. The United Baloch Front (UBF) had claimed responsibility for the October 2014 killings.

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