By Staff Reporter
QUETTA: A district and sessions judge and his security guard were shot dead in Balochistan province on Thursday, in an attack officials say was a deliberate act of retribution against the judiciary, as the restive southwestern region endures its bloodiest spell of militant violence in months.
Abdul Hakeem Kakar was travelling from the provincial capital, Quetta, to the district of Mastung when gunmen opened fire on his vehicle. He and his guard were killed instantly. A second judge, Additional Sessions Judge Tariq Lashari, was among two people wounded in the assault and taken to hospital for treatment.
Mastung’s police station house officer, Abdul Rauf, said the attack unfolded in Paring Abad, an area of Mastung city, and that the assailants were riding motorbikes. Rauf said a search operation had been launched to track down those responsible. No group had claimed responsibility by Thursday evening.
Shahid Rind, an aide to Balochistan’s chief minister on political affairs, said the judge had been deliberately targeted because of his profession. “A judge was targeted only because he is from the judicial fraternity,” he said, drawing a link to the recent sentencing of Baloch Yakjehti Committee leaders in Quetta. “The terrorists want to give a message that if you give verdicts against us, we will target you.”
Rind said Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti had ordered a full review of the killing. “All aspects will be considered. If anyone’s negligence is found at any point, they will not be spared,” he said. He also called for a firm response to militancy free of “political confusions” and voiced support for the introduction of faceless courts, in which judges’ identities are shielded to protect them from reprisals.
President Asif Ali Zardari condemned the killings and offered condolences to the families of the judge and his guard. “The sacrifices of the martyrs will not go in vain,” he said, adding that “the nefarious aims of anti-state elements active under external patronage will never succeed” and pledging to continue counterterrorism efforts until terrorism is eradicated.
A province under siege
Thursday’s killing came a day after gunmen opened fire on a Karachi-bound passenger bus and blew up a bridge on the national highway in Mastung’s Khud Kocha sub-tehsil, killing three people and wounding five. Bahram Saleem, deputy commissioner of Mastung, said the dead included one passenger from Karachi and two from Killa Abdullah district. Authorities responded by imposing an indefinite curfew across Khud Kocha from 9pm that evening.
It was the third deadly attack in Khud Kocha within six days, with the string of violence having killed ten civilians in total. Five people died on 16 July when gunmen attacked a security forces convoy in the area, and two women were shot dead four days later when armed men fired on a family’s vehicle. Yousafzai said residents would be barred from leaving their homes for the duration of the curfew. “In light of the law-and-order situation, the public must fully comply with the administration’s orders,” he said.
The bloodshed comes amid an intensifying counterterrorism campaign across Balochistan. Pakistan’s military said this week that security forces had killed three militants in Mastung, where two suicide bombers and a facilitator were also captured, along with seven more militants killed in Surab district. Figures on the overall death toll since the operations began on 5 July vary by source: security officials cited by state media put the number at 129, while Pakistan’s military separately reported 139 militants killed in the same period, including 10 killed in Surab and Mastung over the 48 hours preceding Wednesday’s report. Among the operations was Operation Shaban, which the state media report said killed 91 militants between 5 and 16 July alone.
Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province by land area but its least populated, has for decades been the site of a separatist insurgency targeting security forces, government installations and Chinese-backed infrastructure and mining projects. The region has also seen attacks claimed by the regional affiliate of Daesh, also known as Islamic State.
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