Pakistani rights activist Sabeen killed

Karachi (IINA) - Sabeen Mahmud, a prominent Pakistani social and human rights activist, has been killed shortly after  hosting an event on Balochistan's "disappeared people" in the southern city of Karachi, Al Jazeera reported quoting officials.

Mahmud, 40, was the director of T2F (The Second Floor), a cafe and arts space that has been a mainstay of Karachi’s activists since it opened its doors in 2007. She was one of the country’s most outspoken human rights advocates. Mahmud was shot four times at close range, with bullets going through her shoulder, chest and abdomen, police said. She was pronounced dead on arrival at the National Medical Centre hospital at 9.40pm local time. Mahmud had been on her way from the event, along with her mother, when her car came under fire from unidentified attackers, according to police. Her mother was also shot twice, but was undergoing treatment in hospital and was out of immediate danger, hospital officials. Mahmud had been present at the opening of a discussion called Unsilencing Balochistan, hosted at T2F, where Mama Qadeer, Farzana Majeed and Muhammad Ali Talpur - prominent Baloch rights activists - had been speaking.

Qadeer and Majeed have long championed the cause of Balochistan's "disappeared," a term used to describe people who have been abducted in Balochistan, with their bodies often found years later. The Voice of Baloch Missing Persons organisation, which both activists belong to, says that more than 2,825 people have "disappeared" in this way since 2005. They allege the disappearances, which are mostly of Baloch rights activists and students, have been carried out by the Pakistani government and its powerful ISI intelligence agency, a charge the agency denies.

Just over a fortnight ago, a similar talk with the same speakers at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) was cancelled at the last minute "on orders from the government", according to a LUMS statement. "Sabeen was a voice of reason, pluralism and secularism: the kind of creed that endangers the insidious side of constructed Pakistani nationalism," said Raza Rumi, a rights activist who escaped an assassination attempt in March 2014 and now lives in the US out of fear for his life. "In her work, she was neither a political partisan nor a power seeker, but Pakistan's state and non-state actors are averse to any

form of dissent. This is why she had to be killed. "Her death has simply reopened my wounds. She gave me support when I escaped death and now I feel even more scared to return to Pakistan. Her death is a huge blow to Pakistan’s civil society and social change movements." A friend of Mahmud's in Karachi, said she had contacted him on Tuesday to ask for advice about whether she should go ahead with the event. "She was having doubts, and the person who had initially agreed to moderate the discussion had backed out," he said. "We discussed the possible blowback that she and T2F could  potentially get in response to holding the event, but I never imagined it would be as brutal and blatant as this."

HA/IINA

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