Twenty unidentified bodies that had been lying in Quetta’s Civil Hospital for several days were formally declared unclaimed and buried under the supervision of the Chhipa Foundation in the Dasht Tera Meel graveyard, local sources confirmed on Thursday.
Officials from concerned departments and volunteers of the Chhipa Foundation attended the burial.
According to hospital and local sources, four of the twenty bodies were brought from Mangocher, a region that has witnessed a series of recent security operations. These four bodies were identified as Gul Khan alias Yaseen, Inayatullah, Izzatullah, and Shay Murad, while the remaining sixteen bodies remain unidentified.
Security operations in Balochistan have long been the subject of controversy, with local and human rights groups frequently labeling them as “fake encounters” or extrajudicial killings. Families of missing persons have also alleged that many victims of enforced disappearances later reappear as unidentified bodies in morgues or remote burial sites.
Baloch nationalist parties and human rights organizations have repeatedly expressed concern over what they describe as a systematic campaign of violence against civilians, accusing Pakistani security forces of targeting non-combatants during military operations and staging encounters to eliminate disappeared persons.
However, officials have maintained that the bodies buried on Thursday belonged to armed “militants” killed during various security operations, including some who were reportedly killed in a recent attack on the Frontier Corps headquarters in Quetta.