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21-02-2026
By SJA Jafri + Bureau Report
LAHORE/ KARACHI: When armed officers from Pakistan’s Crime Control Department raided Zubaida Bibi’s home in Bahawalpur City in southern Punjab province last November, they took everything: mobile phones, cash, gold jewelry and her daughter’s wedding dowry. They also took her sons.
Within 24 hours, five members of her family were dead, killed in separate “police encounters” across different districts of Pakistan’s Punjab, the province that alone is home to more than half of the country’s population.
Her sons Imran, 25, Irfan, 23, and Adnan, 18, along with two sons-in-law, were among them.
“They broke into our house in Bahawalpur and took everything we owned,” Zubaida told a fact-finding mission from Pakistan’s foremost rights group, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).
“We followed them to Lahore and begged for our sons’ release. The next morning, five of them were dead,” she added.
When she later filed a legal petition, Zubaida says police threatened to kill whoever remained in her family if she did not withdraw it.
Her husband, Abdul Jabbar, insists his sons had no criminal records. “They were working men, married with children,” he said.
The family’s account sits at the centre of an explosive HRCP fact-finding report, published on February 17, which concludes that Punjab’s Crime Control Department (CCD) is pursuing what it calls “a systemic policy of extrajudicial killing in contravention of the law and Constitution”.
The HRCP documented at least 670 “encounters”, resulting in 924 suspected deaths between April 2025, when the unit was formed, and December 2025.
The CCD, formally constituted in April last year, was mandated to combat serious and organised crime but the HRCP describes it as a “parallel police force” operating with virtual impunity, linking it to a sharp spike in encounter killings that has ignited debate over the rule of law and the state’s duty to protect the right to life.
Farah Zia, the HRCP’s director, says Punjab was historically where encounter killings first took root in the 1960s, “partly because of an already existing policing culture where there was impunity for torture”.
She said the practice later spread to other provinces. HRCP’s annual State of Human Rights reports document hundreds of police encounters each year elsewhere, particularly in Sindh.
“That the governments choose to apply such short-term, unsustainable and illegal measures to curb crime rather than invest in better forensic investigation techniques, community-based policing and more effective prosecution has not helped matters,” Zia told Al Jazeera.
Under the Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif, the CCD was established with the stated aim of helping bring to fruition the provincial government’s “Safe Punjab” vision.
It is a specialized force aimed at tackling serious and organized crime, inter-district gangs and hardened offenders whom regular police struggle to combat.
Maryam, daughter of three-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and niece of current Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, belongs to the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party.
Within weeks of the CCD’s formation, a sustained rise in police encounters was recorded across Punjab. More than 900 suspects were killed in eight months. In the same period, two police personnel were killed and 36 were injured.
