Lahore: The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has expressed serious concerns over fake police encounters in Punjab and called for an immediate ban on operations conducted by the Crime Control Department (CCD).
In a statement, HRCP said there are grave concerns regarding what it described as staged encounters in the province. The commission said that the CCD appears to have adopted a policy of conducting fake encounters, claiming that over the past eight months, the department carried out 670 encounters in which 924 suspects were killed.
The rights body stated that the pattern of these operations suggests an institutionalized practice rather than isolated incidents. It also termed the absence of judicial and magisterial inquiries into the encounters as deeply alarming.
HRCP has demanded that the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) conduct an independent investigation into the CCD’s actions in collaboration with the National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR).
The commission further noted that in provinces including Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh, the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) has previously faced allegations of involvement in extrajudicial killings, particularly in cases where individuals were reportedly subjected to enforced disappearance before being killed in encounters.
Recently, the CTD claimed to have killed 18 individuals in separate encounters in Karachi, Barkhan, and Quetta, describing them as militants. However, families of the deceased have maintained that the individuals were previously subjected to enforced disappearance.
In another incident in Karachi, four men were killed in what families describe as an extrajudicial encounter. According to relatives, the individuals had earlier been forcibly disappeared, later presented before media and courts as arrested suspects, and were subsequently killed in a police encounter. Their families are currently protesting and demanding transparent investigations and action against the officers involved.
