THE senseless killing of a teenager by his employers in Multan is a crime that deserves unqualified condemnation. It suggests that the powerful in this country still believe they can get away with any criminal act, however heinous. It is also a damning indictment of a state that repeatedly fails to protect its most vulnerable citizens — women and children. But the death of one of the two suspects in this case in an alleged ‘police encounter’ cannot be defended either. The police apparently had a strong case against him, with video evidence in hand. He could have been prosecuted and punished by the courts. Nothing in the circumstances explains why that was not done.

The HRCP has rightly called for an independent and transparent investigation into the encounter. The human rights body said the killing of the teenager and the death of the suspect in an alleged encounter raised “urgent questions about the state’s approach to treating human life and legal safeguards as expendable”. Based on its documentation of hundreds of such alleged encounters since the Crime Control Department was set up in April 2025, it has repeatedly accused the department of a “deliberate policy of staged police encounters leading to extrajudicial killings”. The CCD rejects the charge. It is hard to see what the government has to fear from inquiries into these killings. Innocent people, including a little girl, have also died in such operations. Each case erodes the principle that guilt is established by a court of law. That these killings appear to enjoy the full backing of Punjab’s political leadership worsens the problem because it removes any pressure for accountability from within the system. There is a larger cost as well. A society that accepts extrajudicial killings becomes more tolerant of violence. The teenager’s murder by employers who saw a child’s life as dispensable was itself a symptom of the entrenchment of that brutalisation. So is the killing of a suspect outside the law.

Published in Dawn, October 23rd, 2026