The director of a prominent Karachi-based publishing house, Ilm-o-Adab, has reportedly been subjected to enforced disappearance in a brazen daylight raid at the city’s Urdu Bazaar.
According to eyewitnesses, around noon on Monday, nearly a dozen armed men in plain clothes, their faces covered, stormed the Ilm-o-Adab office located on the third floor of Gole Market Centre. The group forcibly took Changaiz Baloch, the current director of the publishing house, to an undisclosed location. His whereabouts remain unknown.
Sources from Urdu Bazaar reported that before reaching the Ilm-o-Adab office, the armed group destroyed CCTV cameras installed on the first and second floors of the shopping centre, erasing all recorded footage. They then proceeded to the third floor, where they abducted Changaiz Baloch in front of staff and witnesses.
Ilm-o-Adab is one of Karachi’s well-known literary institutions, specializing in the publication of books in Urdu, Balochi, and other regional languages. The publishing house has a long-standing reputation for promoting regional literature and cultural works.
This is not the first time the organization has faced such incidents. On August 26, 2023, the former director of Ilm-o-Adab, Faheem Baloch, was also forcibly disappeared in a similar raid from the same office. CCTV footage of that incident later surfaced, showing members of the Sindh Police and plainclothes operatives taking him away. Faheem Baloch was released after three months in captivity.
Earlier this year, on May 25, a similar case occurred when Pakistani security forces reportedly detained Ghani Baloch of Zawar Kitabjah, a publishing house based in Quetta. Ghani Baloch was picked up near Khuzdar and remains missing.