A minor child and several other civilians were reported killed in alleged drone strikes in Balochistan’s Nushki district, local sources said on Monday, as rights groups questioned Pakistan’s claim that more than 150 militants had been killed in recent operations.
Local sources said the incident occurred in the Killi Jamaldini area late Sunday night when a house was hit in what residents described as a drone strike. The child was identified as Deedag, son of Abdul Manan.
Paank, the human rights department of the Baloch National Movement, condemned the incident, saying on X that “a three-year-old Baloch child, Deedag Baloch, lost his life in a Pakistani drone strike carried…near the Girls’ Primary School Jamaldini.”
Residents reported a night of heavy bombardment across parts of Nushki, describing more than 20 drone strikes in and around Killi Jamaldini. Several houses were damaged, they said, adding that “women and children were among those killed or injured” during the strikes.
They also reported widespread destruction in Nushki’s main market, which they said had been “reduced to rubble, with not a single building left undamaged” after what they described as intensive UCAV bombardment.
Independent verification of these claims was not possible due to an ongoing communications blackout in the district.
Separately, local reports alleged that more than ten civilians were killed when Pakistani forces targeted a vehicle near Cadet College Nushki. The identities of the victims, as well as the circumstances of the strike, remain unconfirmed.
Amid the surge in civilian casualty reports, the Human Rights Council of Balochistan (HRCB) said the broader security situation across Balochistan was “extremely alarming.”
It said the internet shutdown had made it nearly impossible to verify casualty figures or obtain accurate information from areas where clashes between Pakistani forces and fighters of the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) continued.
HRCB said “disturbing reports” had emerged from Kech, Gwadar and Nushki, where “dozens of civilians, including women and children,” were said to have been killed as a result of “indiscriminate firing by Pakistani forces.”
It stressed that these accounts had not yet been independently confirmed but said the gravity of the allegations required immediate attention.
The group criticised the lack of transparency surrounding official casualty claims after the Balochistan government said more than 150 militants had been killed in recent operations. HRCB said the figure “sharply contradicts claims from other sources,” noting that the government had provided no names, profiles or circumstances of those it claimed to have killed.
HRCB also questioned Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti’s statement last month that more than 1,000 “terrorists” were killed in 2024. “Given the long-established pattern of people being killed in custody and later labelled as militants killed in ‘encounters,’ these claims cannot be accepted at face value,” it said.
The organisation called on the government to publicly release the full identities and case details of all individuals it claims to have killed, both during the latest operations and over the past year.