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Baloch protesters demanding an end to enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in their province on Tuesday complained of their Islamabad sit-in being subjected to alleged harassment from unknown individuals despite the presence of the capital city police.
The accusations were levelled by the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), organiser of the Baloch long march in Islamabad, and several figureheads associated with the movement.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the BYC said “masked persons” had arrived and fled with a speaker on a white Toyota Vigo, terming the incident a “shameful act of Islamabad administration and the state”.
“The Islamabad police and the state should stop harassing peaceful Baloch protesters,” the BYC said.
In a later post, it said “at 3:15am our sound system was stolen by the ‘unknown people in civil dress’ despite the presence of multiple police and surveillance cameras.”
The BYC questioned the alleged lack of a police response to the issue and questioned how the individuals had “fled easily”.
Dr Mahrang Baloch, one of the long march organisers, also made the same allegations. The footage shared by her showed Islamabad police personnel present at the scene.
Another organiser, Sammi Deen Baloch, said much the same.
Mahrang later said while speaking to the media that when the police were asked to stop the individuals, personnel of the force replied that the matter was not in their domain.
Mahrang alleged that the police were facilitating the individuals. “This is the limit and what the Islamabad administration is doing … they were facilitators of that attempt,” she added.
Lawyer and human rights activist Jibran Nasir condemned the alleged incident, saying that “it is a moment of shame and sadness to see our ‘guardians’ using such crude tactics.”
The Islamabad police has yet to publicly comment on the matter.
Meanwhile, PML-N Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed said he visited the sit-in camp and it was a “painful, heart-wrenching experience with so many families still searching for their missing loved ones!”
Baloch long march
The Baloch protest march — which began in Turbat on December 6 after the alleged extrajudicial killing of a Baloch youth by the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) personnel — reached the federal capital last week.
However, they were met with brutal force and more than 200 protesters were taken into custody by the Islamabad police. In light of the crackdown, the march led by the BYC had converted into a sit-in outside the National Press Club.
On Saturday, the BYC gave a three-day ultimatum to the government to quash the cases registered against students and activists and release all of the protesters. The following day, the Islamabad police announced it was releasing all the detained protesters after their bail was approved.
Meanwhile, in a social media post on Sunday night, the BYC said only 160 protesters had been released until now and over 100 were still in police custody or “missing”.
It said the Islamabad police had not provided correct information to the protesters and the media, adding that Dr Zaheer Baloch, one of the detained protesters, was still missing. “We are concerned about his life,” the committee said
The caretaker federal government a day earlier had claimed to have released about 290 Baloch demonstrators but the assertion was contested by the protest organisers, who said the authorities released about 130 protesters on Sunday night, but not a single person was released on Monday as claimed by the government.
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