Four young men, including three cousins, were killed and two others injured in a reported Pakistani military drone strike on a group that had gone for a picnic in the Lotham area of Balicha, Tump, in Balochistan’s Kech district on Thursday.
Family sources said six residents of Balicha had travelled to the nearby mountains, where four were preparing food while the other two had gone hunting when the strike took place in the afternoon.
The victims were identified as Yasir, son of Muhammad Karim; Zubair, son of Nawab; Sameer, son of Abdul Khaliq; and Deedag, son of Muhammad Umar. Three of the four were cousins from the same family, according to local sources.
Sources said Pakistani military personnel removed the bodies from the site and took the two injured men away after the strike.
The bodies were later returned to the families, and funeral prayers were held in Balicha Talokan on Saturday morning, attended by a large number of local residents as well as political and social figures. Family members said the two injured men remained in the custody of Pakistani forces.
Residents attend funeral prayers in Balicha for four young men killed in a reported drone strike in Kech district. [TBP]
Pakistani authorities, however, described those killed as suspected militants and claimed that weapons and ammunition had been recovered from them. Families and local residents rejected the account, saying the four were unarmed and had gone to the mountains for a picnic, and called for an investigation.
The Balicha strike is the latest in a series of disputed drone and aerial attacks in Balochistan in which local accounts of civilian casualties have differed from those issued by the Pakistani authorities.
In August, residents of Gidar Goandhan in Surab said Pakistani military aircraft struck civilian homes, killing women and children. The military said militants preparing a vehicle bomb were killed when explosives detonated prematurely, an account residents rejected.
A similar dispute emerged in Khuzdar in July, when the military said four alleged militants were killed during an operation, while sources said a Pakistani military drone killed four civilians and critically injured another person.
In Buleda, also in Kech district, four young men were killed in October 2025 in a drone strike while on a picnic. Around the same period, nine people were injured in a strike at the Hazarganji-Chiltan National Park near Quetta, where the military said militants had been targeted, while witnesses and hospital sources said those injured were civilians.