Islamabad, Pakistan – When armed officers from Pakistan’s Crime Management Division raided Zubaida Bibi’s dwelling in Bahawalpur metropolis in southern Punjab province final November, they took all the pieces: cellphones, money, gold jewelry and her daughter’s wedding ceremony dowry. Additionally they took her sons.
Inside 24 hours, 5 members of her household have been useless, killed in separate “police encounters” throughout completely different districts of Pakistan’s Punjab – the province that alone is dwelling to greater than half of the nation’s inhabitants.
Her sons Imran, 25, Irfan, 23, and Adnan, 18, together with two sons-in-law, have been amongst them.
“They broke into our home in Bahawalpur and took all the pieces we owned,” Zubaida informed a fact-finding mission from Pakistan’s foremost rights group, the Human Rights Fee of Pakistan (HRCP).
“We adopted them to Lahore and begged for our sons’ launch. The subsequent morning, 5 of them have been useless,” she added.
When she later filed a authorized petition, Zubaida says police threatened to kill whoever remained in her household if she didn’t withdraw it.
Her husband, Abdul Jabbar, insists his sons had no prison information. “They have been working males, married with kids,” he mentioned.
The household’s account sits on the centre of an explosive HRCP fact-finding report, printed on February 17, which concludes that Punjab’s Crime Management Division (CCD) is pursuing what it calls “a systemic coverage of extrajudicial killing in contravention of the legislation and Structure”.
The HRCP documented a minimum of 670 “encounters”, leading to 924 suspected deaths between April 2025, when the unit was fashioned, and December 2025.
The CCD, formally constituted in April final 12 months, was mandated to fight critical and organised crime.
However the HRCP describes it as a “parallel police power” working with digital impunity, linking it to a pointy spike in encounter killings that has ignited debate over the rule of legislation and the state’s obligation to guard the best to life.
Farah Zia, the HRCP’s director, says Punjab was traditionally the place encounter killings first took root within the Sixties, “partly due to an already current policing tradition the place there was impunity for torture”.
She mentioned the observe later unfold to different provinces. HRCP’s annual State of Human Rights experiences doc a whole lot of police encounters every year elsewhere, significantly in Sindh.
“That the governments select to use such short-term, unsustainable and unlawful measures to curb crime relatively than put money into higher forensic investigation strategies, community-based policing and simpler prosecution has not helped issues,” Zia informed Al Jazeera.
A brand new power, a pointy rise
Underneath the Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif, the CCD was established with the said intention of serving to carry to fruition the provincial authorities’s “Secure Punjab” imaginative and prescient.
It’s a specialised power geared toward tackling critical and organised crime, inter-district gangs and hardened offenders whom common police wrestle to fight.
Maryam, daughter of three-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and niece of present Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, belongs to the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz social gathering.
Inside weeks of the CCD’s formation, a sustained rise in police encounters was recorded throughout Punjab. Greater than 900 suspects have been killed in eight months. In the identical interval, two police personnel have been killed and 36 have been injured.
By comparability, HRCP’s annual report for 2024 recorded 341 suspects killed in encounters throughout Punjab and Sindh mixed over all the 12 months. The CCD, working in a single province, greater than doubled that toll in lower than eight months.
The very best focus of killings occurred in Lahore, with 139 encounters, adopted by Faisalabad with 55 and Sheikhupura with 47.
The biggest class of suspects killed was these accused of dacoity, armed gang theft, accounting for 366 deaths. Narcotics-related suspects accounted for 114 deaths, theft suspects 138, and people accused in homicide circumstances, 99.
A well-recognized script
Drawing on a number of police experiences filed after the killings, the fee describes how a CCD staff usually intercepts suspects, nearly invariably on bikes and described as shifting “suspiciously”, usually at night time or at a roadblock.
The suspects allegedly react aggressively and open fireplace first, forcing police to reply in self-defence. In the course of the change, the suspects are hit whereas their accomplices escape, “profiting from the darkish”.
HRCP notes what it calls “strikingly related” wording in quite a few FIRs, together with accounts during which a wounded suspect briefly regains consciousness and, simply earlier than dying, volunteers his full identify, parentage, dwelling handle and prison historical past to the officers who’ve shot him.
The fee discovered an identical phrases showing throughout districts, dates and alleged crimes, suggesting “copy-paste structuring relatively than incident-specific reporting”.
Official police media releases issued after every encounter and circulated to crime reporters by way of WhatsApp teams typically additionally reproduce the identical sequence nearly verbatim, emphasising the deceased’s alleged prison document whereas omitting procedural particulars.
Asad Jamal, a Lahore-based human rights lawyer who has lengthy labored on encounter circumstances, mentioned the chief minister, Maryam Nawaz, has repeatedly claimed that crime in Punjab has been curtailed, suggesting the method displays a coverage choice on the highest political stage. He expressed scepticism about prospects for accountability.
“They appear to suppose that if the crime fee is lowered,” Jamal informed Al Jazeera, they’re justified in resorting to “extrajudicial killings” – as an alternative of enhancing investigation strategies, higher assets for legislation enforcement and improved intelligence.
What the federal government and police say
Certainly, in courtroom filings, in keeping with the HRCP, the CCD has claimed its operations diminished property crimes by greater than 60 p.c in a seven-month comparability with 2024, with dacoity-linked murders down by the same margin.
The division says it follows an “intelligence-driven policing mannequin” that has dismantled infamous organised gangs.
It has dismissed the HRCP’s issues, saying the fee lacks proof of extrajudicial killings.
The HRCP counters that even when crime figures have fallen, the strategy issues. Whether or not crime is addressed via investigation, prosecution and a judicial course of, or via abstract execution, goes to the center of what sort of state Punjab seeks to be, the fee argues.
The fee says households reported being informed to bury their useless instantly, earlier than unbiased postmortem examinations might happen.
The HRCP mentioned it acquired no knowledge from Punjab Police after requesting materials on encounter procedures, and written requests to fulfill senior police and provincial officers went unanswered.
Al Jazeera additionally repeatedly contacted Punjab police officers, together with the CCD, in addition to Data Minister Azma Bokhari and Senior Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb, however acquired no replies.
A former senior Punjab police official, who retired within the 2010s, mentioned two predominant elements drive the rise in encounter killings: an overburdened and sometimes corrupt justice system, and political stress to show management over crime.
Courtroom delays and weak prosecutions create “frustration amongst the individuals and the police, they usually begin legitimising brief cuts like extrajudicial killings”, he mentioned.
“The political authorities desires to be seen as controlling crime, even violating due course of. This method additionally encourages police to resort to extrajudicial killings, understanding there received’t be any accountability for such actions,” the official informed Al Jazeera on situation of anonymity.
A decade of encounters
The HRCP’s annual experiences present almost 5,000 encounter circumstances nationwide over the previous decade to 2024, with nearly 2,000 in Punjab alone.
Between 2020 and 2023, encounter figures in Punjab hovered under 400 yearly, suggesting a persistent however comparatively secure baseline.
In 2024, nonetheless, the quantity surged to 1,008, greater than tripling from the earlier 12 months. The most recent report information fewer encounters total however a considerably larger variety of fatalities.
The HRCP and unbiased observers have repeatedly characterised many such incidents as staged or faux encounters, successfully extrajudicial killings during which suspects are executed relatively than arrested.
Rida Hosain, a Lahore-based lawyer, mentioned encounter killings and extrajudicial violence are a “relic of colonial management constructions and army dictatorships” that handled residents as topics relatively than rights-bearing people entitled to a good trial and due course of.
“The Punjab authorities frames these measures as a pathway to ‘zero crime’, when the truth is it seems to institutionalise one other type of criminality: state-sanctioned criminality. As soon as state-sanctioned violence is normalised, it hardly ever stays confined to alleged ‘criminals’,” Hosain informed Al Jazeera.
“The federal government might declare that the a whole lot killed are ‘criminals’, however guilt should be decided via due course of, not abstract executions. If this violence goes unquestioned, tomorrow’s targets could possibly be dissidents, even harmless bystanders labelled as ‘criminals’ to justify killing with impunity,” she added.
