December 19, 2025
By Xari Jalil
LAHORE
On December 26, 2018, Rashid Hussain went missing from Balochistan. Seven years later, his brother Professor Shafiq Baloch was also abducted from his place of work in Hub. Three days later his daughter Mahzeb urges the authorities to recover her father, as police in Hub block BYC activists’ press conference.
Mahzeb like many other Baloch girls, has spent her teenage years organizing protests and press conferences in order to bring attention to her uncle’s abduction to light. Now she must do the same for her father.
A resident of Zehri in District Khuzdar, and now living in Hub Chowki, Shafiq Baloch is a professor in Zehri College, while also running a center for drug rehabilitation called Parvarish. On December 17, at 4:15 in the afternoon, several vehicles parked themselves outside the main entrance of the Parvarish Rehab Centre (PRC) at Adalat Road, and seven to eight men barged in carrying weapons.
“Eye witnesses at the scene have told us that they smashed all the CCTV cameras, and then looked around for my father until they found him,” says Mahzeb while speaking to Voicepk. “They slapped him around and then dragged him forcibly outside. We have not seen him since then. We were never told why.” The men left locking up the staff in a separate room after going through patients’ files.
میرے والد شفیق زہری جو پیشے سے ایک پروفیسر ہیں آج انھیں حب چوکی سے پاکستانی فورسز نے جبری لاپتہ کردیا ہے۔
میرے والد اپنے کام پر موجود تھے وہ ایک ریکوری میں سماجی کام بھی کرتے ہیں جہاں سے انھیں لاپتہ کیا گیا۔
میرے والد کو غیر قانونی حراست اور جبری گمشدگی کا نشانہ بنایا گیا ہے۔ pic.twitter.com/ampfYqJMGS
— Mahzeb Shafiq (@Mahzeb_Shafiq) December 17, 2025
Eye witnesses present at the scene also said that there had been plainclothesmen along with some in uniform. “I was told there were officials from Counter Terrorism Department (CTD), FC personnel and the police along with those from intelligence agencies,” says Mahzeb. So far there has been no clarification from any authorities on the matter – neither an acceptance, nor a denial.
But Mahzeb is fearful because it is not the first time that Shafiq Baloch has been picked up allegedly by the intelligence agencies. In 2014 he had suddenly gone missing for 15 days, and when he had returned there were no scars on his body, but his mind was never the same again. He had become a shell of a person.
“They had inflicted mental torture on him, my father never ever spoke to us about what happened,” she said. “He had become badly affected.”
Taking to X, Sabiha Baloch, another known Baloch rights activist described the case of Shafiq’s disappearance.
“The forced disappearance of Shafiq, son of Abdul Rasool, a 45 year old government teacher from Zehri, Khuzdar, is deeply alarming. On 17 December, he was taken from his office at Hub Chowki and later disappeared from Adalat Road in Hub, Balochistan. His whereabouts remain unknown, reflecting a continued failure to follow any legal procedure. Shafiq is the father of Mahzeb Baloch, a young activist who has been publicly demanding justice for her uncle Rashid Hussain.
Rashid Hussain was arrested in Dubai, forcibly transferred to Pakistan, and has since been disappeared. This context points to collective punishment, where relatives are targeted to pressure and silence those who seek accountability.
The impunity enjoyed by state agencies enables such practices to continue unchecked. Forced disappearances violate fundamental rights and undermine the rule of law. Targeting family members deepens fear and erodes trust. Authorities must disclose Shafiq’s whereabouts, ensure his safety, and end collective punishment and enforced disappearances,” she said.
ریاستی حکام کی جانب سے پریس کلب پر تالہ بندی اور لاپتہ افراد کے لواحقین کو پریس کانفرنس کا حق نہ دینا صحافت پر ریاستی قدغن اور صحافیوں کی مجبوری ظاہر کرتا ہے۔ اس پر صحافتی حلقوں کی خاموشی افسوسناک ہے #ReleaseShafiqBaloch @UN @hrw pic.twitter.com/ucqq7YCKio
— Fareeda Baluch (@FaridaBaloch_) December 18, 2025
Rashid Hussain’s abduction
How Mahzeb, a second year student, became a prominent voice started when her uncle Rashid was abducted. In a previous story, Voicepk has detailed the way Rashid was abducted – first being intercepted and arrested from UAE, detained for six months, and then brought to Balochistan.
‘Where is Rashid Hussain?’ Six years on there is still no answer
Later it became clear that Rashid had been deported by Interpol to the Dalbandin airport in Balochistan (used by the military). The family had known nothing about where he was since the fated day he had left home for work. They learnt of his six month detention in Dubai, and subsequent deportation to Pakistan only after Pakistani mainstream media covered the news some time in June 2019.
However, none of these events were confirmed by the Emirates authorities. According to a letter written by a member of the European Parliament to the Ambassador of UAE, an exit certificate had been seen, which says that Rashid Hussain left on June 22, 2019 for Nushki, in Balochistan, ‘a city which does not have a civilian airport’.
His aunt Ramzan Haleem had also written to the UAE Minister of Interior saying that they had moved to UAE due to the persecution they faced back home, because of their political stance. Her letter said that her nephew Rashid was a Baloch activist who raised voice against human rights violations by the state in Balochistan, against the Baloch people, adding that Rashid had received threats to his life in June 2017 after which he had migrated to UAE.
Ever since then, the rest of the family including Mahzeb, moved back to Pakistan. Despite being a minor, Mahzeb began to find out ways of trying to put pressure on the authorities to help recover her uncle. She was supported by her grandmother as she made her way to rallies and gatherings.
“I was just 12 or 13 then and had no idea what a press club was,” she says referring to a protest call by other missing families outside the Press Club. “When I made my way from my home to the Club that’s all I was thinking. When I saw there were dozens of others just like me, who shared the same stories of their missing loved ones, I also found a support network there.”
Fighting young
Like other prominent names of young Baloch girls who began their early teens by protesting for their fathers and brothers, including Mahrang Baloch and Sammi Deen Baloch, Mahzeb too started that way. And like Mahrang and Sammi, she too has had five FIRs lodged against her, while having been arrested six times. “They have also attempted to arrest me under 3MPO,” she told Voicepk. “My name has also been placed on the fourth schedule list.”
Mahzeb is insistent that her father has nothing to do with anything controversial.
“My father is a peaceful man, and has never even enforced any rules within our home – he is a progressive and open-minded person,” says Mahzaib. “I can clearly bear witness that he has done nothing wrong. Even if there are charges against him he should be brought in court. But at this point, the police is not even lodging the first information report from our side about him going missing.”
Protesting is difficult. A protest in Balochistan could mean lives lost.
During the 2024 Balochistan protests led by the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) in Quetta and surrounding areas, police used force against demonstrators, resulting in at least 3 people killed and about 13 injured when they cracked down on protests and sit-ins. These deaths were reported in connection with the protest suppression itself. There were also three deaths people killed after a protest was killed following the BYC led protests in March 2025, following the Jaffar Express terrorist incident.
In a report by the Amnesty International, Babu Ram Pant, Deputy Regional Director for South Asia at Amnesty International commented, “Every time Baloch protests take place, their demands are met with violence by security forces and mass arrests. We saw it in December last year at the Baloch Long March. We see it now again with the Baloch Raji Machi protests in what is clearly a punitive attempt by the Pakistani authorities to deter, vilify and criminalize peaceful protesters.”
Therefore Mahzeb’s fear of holding any kind of protest in any city in Balochistan, or even Karachi, is valid. “The press clubs wont give us permission, and even if we sit in a public place, they will seal the area,” she says.
Norway based Baloch journalist Kiyya Baloch also posted on X. “Press clubs have long been considered sacred and secure places where intervention by law enforcement agencies was unthinkable. However, for the second time in the past two years, the police have entered the press clubs of Balochistan in an attempt to stop press conferences. Ignoramuses, this is the era of social media and tech; if you stop someone from holding a press conference in a press club, they can emerge with far greater power through social media. This method of suppressing voices through the power of force, guns, and uniforms is neither effective nor based on foresight.”
Civil society reaction
Paank also strongly condemned the enforced disappearance of Shafiq Zehri. “This act reflects collective punishment aimed at silencing dissent. Paank holds the authorities responsible for Shafiq’s safety and demands his immediate release, urging national and international human rights bodies to look into this grave violation.”
“Stopping Mahzeb from holding a press conference against the forced disappearance of her father Shafiq Zehri, and the sealing of the Hub Press Club, is tantamount to imposing restrictions on the freedom of expression, which we condemn, and demand from the government that it grant citizens the right to freedom of expression.”
“For now I have to be careful with everything I do – I need to be there for my family,” says Mahzeb.