Six women were shot dead in separate incidents across Balochistan on Saturday, with three other people injured and the body of an unidentified woman found in a fourth district (Dawn).
In the Segi area of Qila Abdullah, unidentified armed men opened fire on a vehicle, killing two women and injuring a man, his wife and their daughter. The family was originally from Karachi and was returning home when the attackers signalled the driver to stop; the gunfire followed after the driver did not stop. Police are investigating and no arrests have been reported.
In the Killi Mengal area of Noshki, armed men entered a house late on Friday night and opened indiscriminate fire, killing Bibi Hanifa, 50, and her 17-year-old daughter Hafsa. Their bodies were taken to Mir Gul Khan Naseer Teaching Hospital for post-mortem examination before being handed to the family. A case has been registered and police said they were investigating from different angles to establish the motive.
Two women were killed in Nasirabad, with limited detail available.
In the Rej area of Kalat, the body of an unidentified woman was found near the Quetta-Karachi National Highway and taken to District Hospital Kalat, where it awaits identification.
No suspects have been identified in any of the incidents and no motive has been established in any of them. Police have not linked the cases to one another, and none has been publicly attributed to a militant group, a tribal dispute or a so-called honour killing.
That absence is the point worth holding onto. Six women were killed in one day, in four districts, and the state’s account of why amounts to nothing at all.
The killings come at the end of a week in which Balochistan’s own home minister, Mir Ziaullah Langau, escaped an ambush on his convoy in Mastung while travelling from Kalat to Quetta, with the number of wounded from his security detail reported variously between three and seven. Langau has said there are no no-go areas in the province.
Violence in Balochistan is usually reported through the frame of militancy and counter-militancy — security sources said seven militants were killed in Kharan on Sunday and ten in Khuzdar a day earlier. The killings of these six women fit none of that framing, which is part of why they are harder to count and easier to lose.
