The Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) has said the Counter Terrorism Department’s claim that two alleged BLA members were arrested in Karachi was an attempt to cover up the enforced disappearance of two students from Balochistan’s Kech district several months earlier.
The CTD had claimed that Mujahid Baloch and Fareed Baloch alias Zakir were arrested during an intelligence-based operation in Karachi on July 6, with explosives, detonators, primer cord and ball bearings allegedly recovered from their possession.
Related: Karachi CTD Arrest Claims Raise Questions Over Previous Disappearance Reports of Two Suspects
In a statement, the BYC said the two men had already been reported missing in December 2025, adding that presenting them as fresh arrests was a “failed attempt to cover up the crime of enforced disappearance”.
The BYC said 17-year-old Fareed, son of Ijaz and a resident of Singabad Karki, was summoned to the Tejaban FC camp on December 19, 2025, taken into custody and forcibly disappeared.
It said 18-year-old Mujahid Dilwash, son of Dilwash and a resident of Karki Tejaban, was taken into custody by personnel of the CTD and Military Intelligence on December 23, 2025, and was also subjected to enforced disappearance.
The Balochistan Post had earlier reported the disappearance of the two young men, as well as the protest staged by their families and local residents, who blocked the M-8 CPEC highway near Tejaban in Kech after they went missing.
“If these young men had been in the custody of state institutions for several months, then showing them today as arrested in a new operation is, in fact, a failed attempt to cover up the crime of enforced disappearance,” the BYC said.
The BYC said the case reflected a wider pattern in Balochistan in which people are first forcibly disappeared and later shown as arrested in intelligence operations, encounters or terrorism cases.
It said the practice showed that the law was being used “not to provide justice, but to give legal justification to state repression”.
The group appealed to the United Nations to hold Pakistan accountable over enforced disappearances and what it described as “Baloch genocide”.