Two Months Missing, Then Killed in Karachi: Questions Surround Deaths of Two Baloch Workers

KARACHI: For more than two months, the families of two young Baloch workers said they had no answers about where their relatives were or what had happened to them.

On Sept. 18, they were reported dead in a Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) operation in Karachi’s Manghopir area.

The circumstances surrounding their deaths are now the subject of sharply conflicting accounts.

The Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) has identified the men as 23-year-old Yahya Wahid Marri and 28-year-old Hilal Sayad. The organisation argues that both men were forcibly disappeared from Hub Chowki in Balochistan on July 5 and were later killed in a staged encounter.

The CTD, however, says the two men were militants affiliated with the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF) and were killed during an exchange of fire with security personnel in Ghazi Goth, Manghopir.

The department said the operation followed intelligence about the presence of suspected militants. According to the official account, the suspects opened fire, prompting security forces to return fire. A Kalashnikov and a pistol were reportedly recovered from the scene.

The authorities identified the deceased as 23-year-old Yahya son of Abdul Wahid, and 28-year-old Hilal Sayad Muhammad.

That discrepancy of how the men came to be in Manghopir raises questions about the credibility of the CTD’s claims.

BYC says Marri was taken from Hub Chowki on July 5 and that his family spent more than two months without information about his whereabouts. The organisation says Sayad, a daily-wage worker from Malikabad in Tump, was also taken from his home in Hub Chowki on the same date.

For the families, however, the sequence of events has transformed months of uncertainty into a new and more serious question: how did two men reported missing in July come to be among two people killed in a security operation in Karachi in September?

BYC has also appealed to national and international human rights groups, journalists and United Nations mechanisms to examine the case.