A NINE-year-old girl is dead because a Punjab Crime Control Department gunman mistook her family’s car for a getaway vehicle. The robbers who triggered the chase got away that night on a motorcycle; the family, which was visiting from Australia, lost a daughter as they tried to drive home, away from the gunfire. The suspects were never arrested; they were shot dead in an ‘encounter’ a few days later, the same outcome the province has watched play out over and over for the better part of the year. This department has been accused of killing at scale since the day it was formed; names on the list that arrive in the media are already labelled hardened criminals — as if that label were a substitute for a proper trial. When the same script is repeated on an almost daily basis, the pattern turns into what HRCP calls institutionalised practice, though Punjab’s political leadership prefers to laud the ‘performance’ of a department whose main output is dead bodies.

The Chakwal case has aggravated the problem. A CCD officer killed an innocent child, and the inquiry into that killing has so far been left to the CCD’s own command. That is no small detail. The law requires an independent judicial inquiry into deaths like this for a simple reason: institutions do not reliably investigate their own. Asking the CCD’s top brass to judge one of their own officers is like asking a student to grade his own exam, and no FIR amendment and no internally appointed JIT changes that basic fact. The incident was followed by a visit. The department whose officer pulled the trigger sent its chief to sit with the grieving family before any independent outside investigation had even been ordered. This is being termed a compassionate gesture. In fact, it appears more like an attempt to get ahead of the story before it slips out of the department’s control.

Published in Dawn, June 17th, 2026