Pakistan’s Punjab police kill 900 people in eight months: What’s going on?
Al Jazeera
Human rights report alleges record extrajudicial killings by Punjab’s police unit set up to combat organised crime.
Islamabad, Pakistan – When armed officers from Pakistan’s Crime Control Department raided Zubaida Bibi’s home in Bahawalpur city in southern Punjab province last November, they took everything: mobile phones, cash, gold jewellery and her daughter’s wedding dowry. They also took her sons.
Within 24 hours, five members of her family were dead, killed in separate “police encounters” across different districts of Pakistan’s Punjab – the province that alone is home to more than half of the country’s population.
Her sons Imran, 25, Irfan, 23, and Adnan, 18, along with two sons-in-law, were among them.
“They broke into our house in Bahawalpur and took everything we owned,” Zubaida told a fact-finding mission from Pakistan’s foremost rights group, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).
“We followed them to Lahore and begged for our sons’ release. The next morning, five of them were dead,” she added.
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