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 5000 reported cases of enforced disappearance in Pakistan. There are no formal allegations or charges against the persons thus forcefully disappeared.

People who have at any point gone missing

• Naveed Butt (official spokesman of the Islamist political party Hizb ut-Tahrir in Pakistan)
• Munir Mengal
• Allah Nazar Baloch
• Zakir Majeed Baloch
• Ghulam Mohammed Baloch (found dead in 2009, see also Turbat killings)
• Safdar Sarki
• Saud Memon
• Aafia Siddique and her three children
• Hafiz Abdul Basit
• Muzaffar Bhutto

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.

See also

• Forced disappearance
• Balochistan conflict
• Gun politics in Pakistan
• Human rights in Pakistan
• Target killings in Pakistan
• Enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka