In a press conference in Quetta press club, Zuhra Raza, widow of student leader Raza Jahangir, has alleged the Pakistani law enforcement agencies behind the deadly attack carried out on her in the past week in front of Balochistan University.
Zuhra said that a few days back, she was targeted in front of Balochistan University in Quetta city but luckily she survived in the deadly attack. She added that she has no enmity with anyone. She went on saying that she was targeted by the state forces because of her husband’s activism — who was killed nine years ago in 2013 in Turbat’s Absor area by security forces.
Further addressing the press conference, she said that her father-in-law, Bakhtiyar Baloch was killed along with six others in a Zigrana (a worship place for the Zikri sect) by the same forces one year after her husband was killed. Zuhra said that none of the given events were accidental “but the state institutions and their proxies are deliberately involved in everything that happened.”
Speaking to journalists, Zuhra Baloch said that she was not the first woman who has been targeted in Balochistan. “Many Baloch women have been victimised before me and now they [state agencies] have maintained their strategy,” she said.
She further stated that abduction and target killing of Baloch women has been underway for a long time in Balochistan. If it did not stop, there were possibilities of more Baloch women to be victims of the ongoing collective punishment, she added. “I have left my hometown and come to Quetta to save my children and provide them education in a better environment but here too, we are not being let live peacefully,” Zuhra said
Zuhra is mother of two minors — according to her, one of her child is in seventh grade and the other one is in 3rd grade. She is concerned about the safety of her and two sons.
Zuhra said the through her press conference she wants to inform all the human rights bodies that she has no enmity with anybody — “If something happens to me and my children, the state institutions will be responsible for that,” she stated.
“I request the human rights groups and journalists to help me to make my voice reach to the authorities so that we will be spared from injustices,” she concluded.