KARACHI, March 4: Speakers at a meeting on Sunday demanded that “army action” in Balochistan be stopped and the military and Frontier Corps be sent back to the barracks immediately.

Speaking at the meeting organised by the Labour Party at the Karachi Press Club, Nasir Mansoor, Zehra Akber, Sajjad Zaheer, Shabbir Azad, Sherbaz and Mushtaq Ali also demanded that a more powerful high-level commission under the Supreme Court be set up to investigate the issue of missing persons.

Condemning the targeted killing of the wife, daughter and driver of MPA Bakhtiar Domki in Karachi, they demanded that a high-level judicial commission be set up to probe the issue and real culprits behind the crime be brought to book and punished according to law.

They said that rather than turning Balochistan into a Beirut, the right of the Baloch people on the resources of their province be accepted and they be allowed to take their own decisions.

They also condemned the mysterious disappearances of Baloch political activists and demanded that intelligence agencies be stopped from taking extrajudicial steps against Baloch youths. They also demanded that people forcibly evicted from Dera Bugti and Kohlu be respectably relocated to their ancestral areas.

They said the party had organised demonstrations in different towns of the province to protest over the state “atrocities being committed against the Baloch” and express solidarity with them. They said the state agencies considered themselves above the law and the constitution and used brutal force against Baloch people, who were just seeking their rights.

The leaders also visited the camp of the Baloch people set up by the family members, relatives and friends of missing persons.

At the camp the families of missing persons told them that more than 14,375 people had gone missing since 2002, while over 400 mutilated and tortured bodies had been recovered in different places and over 5,000 Baloch youth had been killed.