Twenty under-training police personnel travelling home for the weekend were seized from a passenger van on the Quetta-Karachi Highway in Balochistan’s Mastung district on Friday evening, officials said, in the fourth abduction of government personnel in the province in two months. As of Saturday evening, the recruits’ whereabouts were unknown and security forces were searching the nearby mountains.
What happened on the highway
A senior Balochistan government official confirmed the abduction to Dawn on condition of anonymity. “Yes, 20 police personnel who were going home for the weekend were taken away by armed men while they were travelling in a passenger van on the Quetta-Karachi Highway in Mastung,” the official said. The official said the attackers arrived on motorcycles carrying automatic weapons, intercepted the van and took the recruits away with the vehicle to an undisclosed location.
Reports place the interception in the Gorgina area of Mastung, described as remote and mountainous, while some accounts locate it on the Sarband route between Kalat and Nushki. The armed men checked the identity documents of everyone aboard the van, then released the driver and three other passengers and took the 20 recruits away. Police officials in Mastung also confirmed the abduction to Dawn. The seizure came a day after a 5.6-magnitude earthquake jolted the Khuzdar region of Balochistan.
Who the recruits were
The abducted personnel belonged to the Levies Force, which has since been merged into the police, Mastung police officials told Dawn. All twenty came from Balochistan’s Rakhshan division; one official told Arab News they belonged to the Nushki, Kharan, Chagai and Washuk districts. The recruits were in training at the Kalat Police Training Centre and were travelling home on leave when they were taken.
The fourth abduction in two months
A day before the Mastung interception, Rakhshan Division Commissioner Asad Ullah Kakar was abducted along with his driver in Kharan district, and both remained missing as of Saturday, according to police accounts carried by Daily Pakistan. Earlier, Kharan Deputy Commissioner Munir Ahmed Soomro was released safely on October 3 after nearly two weeks in captivity; Dawn reported that his release followed negotiations between local tribal elders and the armed men who had seized him from the Noshki-Kharan highway the previous month. Daily Pakistan counts the Mastung case as the fourth reported abduction of government personnel in the area in two months, noting that a judicial magistrate and a deputy commissioner were also taken in earlier incidents and later released by their captors. Dawn separately noted that three excise officials were kidnapped on July 21 after an attack on a checkpost in Balochistan’s Chagai district.
The recurring method
What links the recent cases is a repeated method: armed men stop private vehicles on highways, single out government personnel, often by checking identity documents, and release the civilians. In Mastung, the attackers checked the van’s occupants, let the driver and three passengers go, and kept the recruits. In the Kharan commissioner’s case, one accompanying person was later released while the commissioner and his driver were kept. No group has claimed responsibility for the Mastung abduction, and officials have not publicly named suspects. Arab News noted that separatist militants such as the Balochistan Liberation Army have claimed attacks on law enforcers in the province in the recent past.
What happens next: the two tracks
Two parallel efforts now decide how such cases end. The first is the security response: forces have launched a search operation in the mountainous terrain around Mastung, set up checkpoints in and around the district and tightened security in neighbouring areas, officials said. The second is the negotiation channel that resolved the last case, when tribal elders secured the Kharan deputy commissioner’s release. As of Saturday evening, neither track had produced the recruits’ whereabouts.
The kidnappings have sharpened worries about the safety of public officials and security personnel travelling across Balochistan, and they add to the security pressures behind Pakistan’s demand for a verifiable mechanism to end cross-border terrorism from Afghan soil. Balochistan and neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have both seen a rise in militant attacks and kidnappings in recent months, a period in which an emergency and governor’s rule were imposed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. For the latest Pakistan national news, follow our rolling coverage.
