Waseem Abbas, a 15-year-old orphan sent from a Multan orphanage to learn electrical work, was run down by a car in the city’s Royal Orchard housing society on October 19. Police say the man he worked for, Tauqeer Nazir, chased him and drove over him. Tauqeer was arrested, produced before a magistrate and handed to police on physical remand.
By the early hours of October 21 he was dead. The Crime Control Department (CCD) says he escaped custody after the transport vehicle got a flat tyre, turned up on a motorcycle near Bahawalpur’s Northern Bypass, roughly 100 kilometres away, and was killed by bullets fired by his own accomplice during a shootout with its team. The accomplice, police say, got away.
A day earlier in Islamabad, Muhammad Noman, the main suspect in the fraud case linked to the suicide of university gold medallist Laiba Ijaz, died while in police custody. Police say four men on motorcycles attacked the team transporting him in an attempt to free him.
Two days, two dead suspects, two accounts in which someone else fired the fatal shots. When the state decides to move, it can move very fast. The question worth asking is why it so often does not.
The cases that slowed down
On August 19, 2024, an SUV ploughed through vehicles on Karachi’s Karsaz Road, killing 60-year-old Imran Arif and his 26-year-old daughter Amna. The driver, Natasha Danish, was granted bail after the victims’ family forgave her, and a sessions court acquitted her on October 31, 2024 after an affidavit of settlement. A separate drug case, registered after an initial medical report pointed to methamphetamine, ended on September 4 this year with another acquittal after the court found no evidence of drug use in her blood test. Two years on, nobody has been punished for two deaths.
On December 2, 2025, near PTV Chowk in Islamabad, an SUV struck two young women on a scooter, Samreen and Tabinda, killing both. Police said the vehicle was driven by the teenage son of Islamabad High Court Justice Muhammad Asif. He was remanded for four days; within the week the families pardoned him under the qisas and diyat provisions of the Penal Code, and a magistrate ordered his release on bail. A retired colonel’s complaint that the judge had used his office to influence the case was dismissed by the Supreme Judicial Council in May, with no reasons made public.
In June 2022, two Savour Foods workers, Shakeel Tanoli and Hasnain Ali, were killed by an SUV near the Sohan bridge on Islamabad’s Expressway. The FIR was lodged 11 days later. The case against Shanzay Malik, daughter of Justice Malik Shahzad Ahmed Khan, ended in acquittal in February 2025, and one victim’s father later withdrew his appeal, saying he had named her out of misunderstanding. The family reportedly settled with the other victim’s relatives.
Then there is Lahore. In early July, police booked five men over the alleged abduction and rape of two foreign women, one from the Netherlands and one from Venezuela, and named Muhammad Raza Dar as the prime suspect. Lahore police said they had verified with the family that he was a relative of Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar. Rana Sanaullah, the prime minister’s adviser, responded that attempts were being made to drag the deputy prime minister into the matter. The government said the suspect would be treated like any other criminal, and Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz ordered “100pc merit”. The accused were sent on remand and the women recorded statements in court. More than three months later, no trial outcome has been made public, and Raza Dar has not been convicted of any offence.
Different speeds, different outcomes
Laid side by side, the cases show a pattern that has little to do with the law on paper. One ended in a settlement, one in a pardon, one in an acquittal after a retracted accusation, and one has gone quiet. None of the accused was killed in an “encounter”. None was described as having escaped from custody and conveniently run into a police checkpoint.
Each of those outcomes was legal. Pakistan’s qisas and diyat law allows victims’ heirs to forgive and compound offences that cause death, and courts must acquit where evidence is weak. That is precisely the point. The law offers due process, bail, settlement and acquittal to those who can mobilise lawyers, money and influence. For others, the same state offers something faster and more final.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan documented at least 670 CCD-led encounters in eight months of 2025, in which 924 suspects were killed and two police officers died, and called the numbers a conservative minimum. Lahore led the list with 139 encounters. The commission said official accounts were so uniform, suspects firing first, accomplices attacking the escort, police acting in self-defence, that they pointed to an “institutionalised practice” of staged killings, and it called for a judicial inquiry and a moratorium. Lahore readers will recognise the template, from suspects wounded by their own accomplices’ fire in Kahna to an alleged CCD encounter in Badami Bagh and wives moving court to trace brothers held by the CCD.
Among those 924 dead, there is no record of a single person whose grandfather sat in the federal cabinet or whose father sat on a high court bench.
Applause is not justice
Hina Parvez Butt, a ruling party lawmaker who heads the Punjab Women Protection Authority, greeted Tauqeer’s death with a post saying that under Maryam Nawaz’s government, justice is delivered immediately. The post was reportedly deleted after lawyers and journalists objected. Rana Sanaullah, meanwhile, has defended the CCD and challenged critics to name an innocent person it has killed.
That challenge misses the point. Innocence is what a trial is meant to establish. A suspect who is killed in custody can never be proved innocent or guilty, and the victim’s family is denied a verdict as surely as the accused is denied a defence. Waseem Abbas deserved a court that would name his killer and punish him. He got a CCD press release.
Public frustration with slow courts is real and understandable. Punjab’s low conviction rates in rape cases and the deaths of detainees in Lahore police custody erode faith in the system from both ends. But a state that answers slow justice with summary killings for the powerless, while leaving the powerful to settlements and silence, is not fixing the system. It is formalising its double standard.
The fix is not complicated. Every death in custody or in an encounter should trigger an independent magisterial inquiry, as the law already requires, and an FIA investigation under the Torture and Custodial Death Act. Qisas and diyat compromises in cases involving powerful accused should face closer judicial scrutiny for coercion. Cases that stall, such as the Lahore foreign women case, deserve public timelines.
Until then, the speed of the state will keep telling citizens what the statute books will not: a bullet for the poor, a settlement for the rich, and an endless wait for everyone in between.
Sources: Dawn, The Express Tribune, ARY News, Daily Pakistan, Aaj News, SAMAA, Pakistan Observer, Geo News, HRCP fact-finding report (February 2026).
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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