Missing persons (Pakistan)

Missing persons is a generic term used in Pakistan to refer to the alleged ostensibly hundreds of persons in Pakistan who have been forcefully disappeared by the different security and law enforcement agencies. According to Amina Masood Janjua, a human rights activist and chairperson of Defence of Human Rights Pakistan; a not for profit organization working against enforced disappearance there are more than 70,000 reported cases of enforced disappearance in Pakistan. There are no formal allegations or charges against the persons thus forcefully disappeared.

The term Missing Person also includes people who were secretly abducted, but whose tortured dead bodies were found a few days later. In some cases, the court has demanded that the officials concerned allow the person in their custody to appear before the court. However, immediately after the court verdict, their dead bodies are found by their relatives.

Some have reported to have been handed over to the CIA and/or flown to Bagram, Afghanistan and later shipped off to Guantanemo Bay. Reports of forced abductions by the Pakistani state first began arising in 2001, in the aftermath of the United States invasion of Afghanistan and the commencement of the US-led War on Terror. Many of the missing persons are activists associated with the secular Baloch nationalist and Sindhi nationalist movements.

According to the International Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, 18,000 Baloch have gone missing by January 2014. Of these, 2,000 were killed between 2001 and 2013. Some of the prominent activists that had gone missing:

The victims families give horrifying descriptions of tortured suffered by the abductees. Some bodies were found without their heart, lungs and intestines. Some had their eyeballs removed. In one case, the body was reportedly given to medical students for training. The mother of one of the abducted activists said, "they do this to scare us." However, "these bodies have made the mothers stronger. They sing songs of revoluiton when they see the dead now."

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