A terrorist does not assassinate a judge merely to kill a man. He fires at the very idea that violence can be brought before the law.
That is why the July 23 assassination of District and Sessions Judge Abdul Hakeem Kakar in Mastung cannot be treated as one more entry in Balochistan’s growing register of bloodshed. Judge Kakar was travelling from Quetta to perform his official duties when gunmen attacked the judicial officers’ vehicles near the Wali Khan crossing. His police guard was also martyred, while Additional Sessions Judge Tariq Lashari and another person were critically injured.
The assassins were not confronting an armed convoy in a battlefield. They were attacking men travelling to a courtroom.
By attacking the judiciary, terrorists were attempting to send a message far beyond Mastung: those who prosecute, convict or punish terrorism will themselves be placed in the terrorists’ crosshairs.
On June 22, an anti-terrorism court in Quetta sentenced Baloch Yakjehti Committee leaders Mahrang Baloch and Sibghatullah Shahji to life imprisonment in the case concerning the killing of Frontier Corps soldier Shabbir Baloch during the July 2024 Gwadar protest. The court convicted them of murder and terrorism-related offences after prosecutors argued that the accused had incited the crowd that seized and fatally attacked the soldier.
Barely a month later, a serving sessions judge was murdered while travelling to his court.
Balochistan government representatives have linked the choice of target with the recent conviction of BYC leaders, arguing that terrorists intended to warn the judicial fraternity against delivering verdicts in terrorism cases. The apparent message was chillingly simple: enforce the law and the law’s representatives will be killed.
Words do not have to contain an explicit operational instruction to help create an atmosphere conducive to violence.
This is where the debate surrounding the relationship between political mobilisation, extremist propaganda and terrorist violence becomes unavoidable. The state’s case regarding a BYC-BLA continuum is not merely that every slogan constitutes an armed operation. The argument is that terrorism requires more than guns. It needs an ecosystem: a language that legitimises violence, narratives that portray every terrorist as a victim, political platforms that delegitimise state institutions and international campaigns that erase the crimes for which legal proceedings were initiated.
When judges are publicly described as puppets, courts are portrayed as instruments of occupation and every conviction is declared illegitimate before the evidence is even examined, the result is not harmless dissent. Such rhetoric can create the moral permission within which terrorists present murder as resistance and assassins are transformed into heroes.
Words do not have to contain an explicit operational instruction to help create an atmosphere conducive to violence.
Those international organisations that campaigned against the conviction of Mahrang Baloch and her associate must also confront a reality they routinely remove from their statements: Pakistan’s anti-terrorism courts are not functioning in the tranquillity of Geneva.
International advocacy cannot be allowed to discuss the rights of the convicted while making the murdered soldier, threatened witnesses and slain judicial officers disappear from the picture.
Human rights cannot become a selective instrument through which the accused acquire names, faces and international campaigns, while the victims of terrorism are reduced to statistics.
The Mastung attack also explains why protected proceedings, remote testimony, witness-protection arrangements and what are popularly called “faceless courts” have become necessary in terrorism cases. These measures are sometimes presented abroad as proof of oppression. The murder of Judge Kakar demonstrates the security reality behind them.
There can be no open justice if an open courtroom becomes an open invitation to assassination. Security for the judicial process is not an administrative luxury. It is now a constitutional necessity.
The Islamic State Khorasan Province’s reported claim of responsibility adds another disturbing layer. The claim appeared within hours of the assassination, even as the attack was being assessed within the prevailing pattern of Baloch separatist violence in Mastung.
Pakistan’s investigators must not allow a press release issued by a terrorist organisation to close the case. Were ISKP operatives directly involved? Was the attack facilitated locally by another network? Was advance information shared? Was responsibility assumed to divert public anger from the organisation that planned or enabled the killing? Or are apparently different terrorist organisations developing arrangements for tactical assistance and propaganda amplification?
These questions require digital forensics, communications intelligence and financial investigation. Ideological differences have never prevented terrorist organisations from cooperating when their immediate objectives converge. Both the BLA and ISKP seek to generate fear, weaken state authority, internationalise insecurity and demonstrate that Pakistan cannot protect either its citizens or its institutions.
Only a day before Judge Kakar’s assassination, gunmen attacked a Karachi-bound passenger bus in Khad Kocha, killing three passengers and injuring five. A bridge on the Quetta-Karachi highway was also damaged in an explosion, disrupting a transport artery used by ordinary citizens and prompting the authorities to impose an indefinite curfew.
This was accompanied by counterterrorism operations in which security forces reported killing militants, dismantling hideouts and apprehending suspected facilitators and would-be suicide bombers.
Viewed together, these are not disconnected incidents. The targets form a map of terrorist intent: a passenger bus, a bridge, a military convoy, a courtroom and the judges who preside over it.
The object is not the liberation of the Baloch people. It is the paralysis of Balochistan.
A blown-up bridge does not injure Islamabad; it isolates local communities. Bullets fired at a bus do not strike the establishment; they kill poor passengers. The assassination of a judge does not weaken some abstract elite; it deprives the people of Mastung of the institution responsible for resolving their disputes and protecting their rights.
This is terrorism against the Baloch people before it is terrorism against the Pakistani state.
The terrorists want judges to look over their shoulders before writing judgments. They want witnesses to remain silent, prosecutors to retreat and ordinary citizens to conclude that the gun is stronger than the law. Pakistan’s answer must be delivered not through grief alone but through arrests, prosecutions, protected courts and enforceable convictions.
The writer is a freelance columnist.