Takari Bahadur Ali Kiazai, a government servant, was allegedly abducted by unidentified armed men from the Brewery Road in Quetta. His family members on Monday gathered to protest against his “enforced disappearance”, staging a sit-in protest on the bypass road and blocking the key highway in the city.
The protestors said that Kiazai worked as a government servant in Quetta, and they fear that the intelligence agencies of Pakistani might be behind his “enforced disappearance.” They did not elaborate on the comment. The traffic on the bypass road was suspended for many hours. The protestors demanded that Kiazai be brought back.
“Enforced disappearances” have plagued Balochistan for decades now, and the pace has now intensified. According to painstakingly meticulous estimates, at least a 20,000 individuals have gone missing in Balochistan. Thousands of other have been killed and their dead bodies thrown in random city streets, wilderness or dumped in a mass grave somewhere.
Human rights activists claim that the Pakistani security and intelligence agencies are behind these rampant disappearances. They say that this practice is a part of a coordinated effort from the Pakistani military establishment to put an end to the rebellion that has been pestering the state for decades now. The activists claim that they security forces arbitrarily arrest innocent civilians, confine them in torture cells for years and then kill them and throw their dead bodies away. Anyone considered to a sympathizer of the Baloch national struggle for independence is dragged away, and only a few survive to tell the tale.