Pakistan News

QUETTA: The bodies of six of seven labourers who were kidnapped earlier this week in the Turbat city of Balochistan’s Kech district were found with bullet wounds on Thursday, an official told Dawn. On Tuesday, unidentified armed men had blocked Turbat-Mand Road in the Kalatak area of Kech district and taken away the seven labourers, who were travelling in a vehicle. The kidnappers had killed one of the labourers the same day and dumped his body on a highway. On Thursday, the bodies of the remaining six labourers were also found, Balochistan Home Department spokesperson Babar Yousafzai told Dawn . He said the kidnappers had taken the labourers to an undisclosed location, where one of them was killed shortly after the abduction and his body was dumped on the highway. They later also killed the six remaining labourers, whose bodies were found in Turbat’s Nasirabad area, he added. Yousafzai said the bodies bore torture marks and bullet wounds, and it seemed that the labourers had be...

New Zealand’s top diplomat Winston Peters drew the ire of Beijing’s ambassador in Wellington on Thursday after telling a lawmaker of Chinese descent to “go back to your own country”. During a debate about New Zealand’s response to the Covid pandemic on Wednesday, populist NZ First leader Peters was asked by China-born Green Party member Lawrence Xu-Nan: “Are you vaccinated?” In response, Peters said the lawmaker, who was born in the Chinese city of Tianjin but grew up in Auckland, had “come here five minutes ago”. “Go back to your own country. That’s where they lie like a flatfish, but they don’t lie like that here,” Peters said. “This is called a democracy, unlike what you’re used to. Go back to where you’ve come from, you loudmouth.” The comments sparked a rare intervention from Chinese ambassador to New Zealand Wang Xiaolong. Wang said on X on Thursday that while he preferred to stay out of domestic politics, “suffice it to say, sometimes, a statement says more about the perso...

The Foreign Office (FO) said on Thursday that Pakistan was doing its “utmost” to bring the United States and Iran back to the negotiating table under the Islamabad memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed last month. Addressing a weekly press briefing, FO spokesperson Tahir Andrabi said Pakistan noted with concern that the security situation in the Middle East “remains precarious despite the relative calm of the past few days, which had rekindled hopes that this positive development, this calm, would consolidate into a durable and fully respected ceasefire and pave the way for dialogue”. Andrabi reiterated Pakistan’s support for dialogue and diplomacy, maintaining that it remained the “only viable path forward”. “We welcome all efforts aimed at sustaining cessation of hostilities and resumption of dialogue between Iran and the US,” he said, adding that Pakistan remained engaged and will continue to do so. “Let me add that the negotiations between parties are ongoing to normalise t...

Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar on Wednesday welcomed Kuwait’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Jarrah Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, who is on an official visit to the country, at the Foreign Office (FO). State-run Pakistan TV shared a picture of the two shaking hands on the social media platform X. The visiting dignitary arrived in Islamabad on Tuesday at the invitation of Deputy PM Dar. The FO said that upon arrival at the Islamabad International Airport, he was received by Zahid Hussain, additional secretary at the foreign ministry. “During the visit, the two sides will hold talks covering the full spectrum of bilateral relations and exchange views on regional and international issues of mutual interest,” it said. It added that the minister’s visit to Pakistan reflected the longstanding brotherly relations between the two countries, “anchored in shared history, mutual trust and close cooperation”....

Preliminary work on a vast hotel project linked to the Trump family has already caused irreparable damage to a once pristine stretch of Albania’s coast, scientists and activists say. Satellite images obtained by AFP show that during a 25-day period in May, a road was cleared, an entire zone deforested and a bridge built to span the channel connecting the Narta lagoon to the sea. “Bulldozers on the beaches have already damaged the nesting sites of loggerhead turtles, which are threatened with extinction,” Olsi Nika, a marine biologist who heads the NGO EcoAlbania, told AFP . In addition, the nesting grounds of numerous bird species have been disturbed by access roads through the dunes and the felling of trees, while construction on a vital channel between the lagoon and the sea has severely disrupted water flows essential to maintaining wetlands. “An absolute biodiversity massacre,” said Nika. Daily demonstrations against the project have led to the suspension of some work, but th...

I did not expect to leave Islamabad thinking about the future of international law. I went to speak. I came home with something harder to shake: a conviction that what is happening on the Indus river is not just a bilateral water dispute between two nuclear-armed neighbours. It is a test of whether the global architecture of treaty-based cooperation can survive the moment we are living in. On June 30, I had the honour of speaking at the Institute of Regional Studies seminar on the Indus Waters Treaty , held at the Jinnah Convention Centre in Islamabad. The high-level gathering brought together scholars, practitioners, diplomats, and policymakers from Pakistan and around the world. The expertise assembled in the room was formidable, and the sense of urgency surrounding the issue was unmistakable. My panel was asked to examine treaty-based conflict prevention, specifically, how the institutional mechanisms embedded in international river agreements keep water from becoming a cause of w...

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday directed authorities to increase the country’s strategic petroleum reserves as the cabinet committee approved amendments to the Pakistan Oil Refining Policy 2023. The remarks came as he chaired a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Energy, during which amendments to the Pakistan Oil Refining Policy 2023 were approved, according to a statement issued by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). The meeting was given a detailed briefing on the progress of upgradation of oil refineries in the country, reforms in the energy sector, and implementation of the policy. “The upgradation of oil refineries is an important need of the time and is a key pillar of Pakistan’s comprehensive energy security system,” PMO quoted the premier as saying. He stated that refineries aligned with modern requirements would not only better meet the country’s energy needs but would also prove helpful in reducing dependence on imported fuel and providing environment-friendly fu...

On paper, Pakistan is a recycling success story. On plastic, not so much. Bad puns aside, the World Bank has said we beat all of South Asia with the lowest marine plastic pollution rates. Those in the business will tell you Pakistan is flipping trash so well that it now imports used gallon milk jugs from Ohio, and may teach Saudi Arabia how to turn it into street pavers. Why bother with cloth bags and paper straws if we are already recycling kings? Because of biscuit and chips packet wrappers and the question of what happens to them. And what I discovered in Shershah. Karachi’s Shershah market is a byword for recycling, but over the years, fussy power supplies have hemmed business into a corner of the neighbourhood called Paracha, named after a textile mill. What I saw at these small setups here is the part of Pakistan’s success story that no recycler brings up. You know how it works. Labourers sort household trash by colour, discard what can’t be recycl...

I have worked on my university’s Admission Committee for 16 years, long enough to have watched several cycles of both growth and contraction. But nothing in those years prepared me for what the last three or four have looked like, and nothing about the current decline is evenly spread. It is concentrated, sharply, among girls applying to evening programmes. When I began speaking directly with hesitant applicants and their parents to understand why confirmed seats were being given up, the reasoning was strikingly consistent, and stated without much hesitation. “In this inflation, why should I spend such a heavy amount on my daughter’s education when there is no job security for her in the future?” one mother asked me plainly. With no guaranteed job waiting at the end of an evening degree, she said, that money was better saved for her daughter’s dowry and wedding than spent on tuition. She was not the only parent to put it like that. These were not abstractions to me. They were mothers,...

A popular far-right Australian politician failed on Monday to overturn a racial vilification finding that was handed down after she told a Muslim senator to go back to Pakistan. Senator Pauline Hanson has emerged as one of Australia’s most popular politicians, wooing voters with calls for strict immigration curbs, mass deportations of “illegal migrants” and enhanced free speech protections. Hanson took aim at Pakistan-born Australian lawmaker Mehreen Faruqi in 2022 over comments made in the wake of Queen Elizabeth II’s death . Faruqi, a left-leaning Greens senator, said she could not mourn the “leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised people”. Hanson replied on social media: “When you immigrated to Australia you took every advantage of this country. You took citizenship, bought multiple homes, and a job in a parliament. It’s clear you’re not happy, so pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan.” ...

WHILE the killing of suspected criminals in alleged encounters is not a new phenomenon, it is rare in Karachi for arrested suspects to be brought to raids to arrest their accomplices and for them to end up dead “by firing from their own accomplices”. Thursday’s killing of three suspects, who were arrested recently for murdering a doctor during a robbery in Clifton, in a “shoot-out” between police and their alleged accomplices gives rise to the impression that Sindh police are now gradually moving towards the Punjab Crime Control Department’s (CCD) style of “dispensing justice”, which has been quite infamous for such encounters. Dawn reached out to several top officials for comments, but they declined to go on record. However, in background conversations, they said this was partly due to “frustration with the criminal justice system” and partly to prevent “the entry of criminals from Punjab” into Sindh, particularly Karachi. They said several suspects had fled the CCD operations in L...

Growing up with a chronically ill mother in a remote village in India, Rema Begum aspired to become a doctor until her dream was cut short by her own tragic death. After years of studying and costly coaching classes, the 20-year-old believed she had finally done enough to win a coveted seat at a government medical school. Then came news that the question paper of the medical entrance examination she sat for had been leaked, and a retest was ordered. Days later, Begum was dead. She was among at least 20 students who reportedly took their own lives after the incident, according to local media and activists. The exam paper leak, alongside a string of other irregularities, has fuelled nationwide protests and public anger over an education system many students say is stacked against them. A month after her death, Begum’s father Rajaul Islam is still struggling to understand how his “gem” of a daughter lost hope. But he believes the retest announcement changed everything. “After th...

The deceptive veneer of a monolithic and unyielding Taliban regime is rapidly giving way to profound structural decay, demonstrating that authoritarian societal suppression should not be conflated with institutional permanence or state capacity. Nearly five years after the fall of Kabul, the Taliban administration has reached a strategic impasse, balancing precariously on the precipice of a localised, multi-factional civil conflict. This impending instability is not merely a function of diplomatic isolation or international sanctions. Instead, it is being accelerated by an unsustainable internal economy of power, a volatile relationship with regional neighbours, and the emergence of decentralised, non-state resistance movements. Fissures within Domestically, the regime is fracturing along factional lines as the illusion of a unified command is replaced by a zero-sum power struggle between two competing power centres. On one side stands the radical Kandahar faction, a hyper-conserva...

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said on Friday that durable peace and stability in the region can only be achieved by eliminating the threat of terrorism emanating from neighbouring Afghanistan. “Durable peace, stability and economic development can only be achieved with the eradication of the menace of terrorism emanating from Afghan soil,” he said while speaking at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Council of Foreign Ministers’ meeting. He said that Pakistan desired to see a “peaceful, stable, regionally integrated and prosperous Afghanistan which is at peace with itself and its neighbours”, adding that this would be in the best interest of all SCO member states and beyond. He said that currently, the threat of terrorism emanating from Afghanistan was one of the most serious security challenges for Pakistan. He said that terrorist organisations continued to recruit, train and operate from Afghan soil “under the watch and facilitation of the Afghan Ta...

Two people were stabbed in New York on Thursday, with police saying that they had arrested a suspect and were evaluating the incident as a possible hate crime. The two victims, who were targeted in separate attacks near Manhattan’s Central Park, were “an Asian male and a Jewish male,” New York City police commissioner Jessica Tisch said on X, adding that they were both hospitalised and “expected to survive”. The New York Police Department (NYPD) arrested the suspect, identified as 51-year-old Raul Morales. “Detectives are continuing to work the case and determine motive, but according to victim and witness statements, Morales yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ during both attacks,” Tisch said. “The NYPD is currently evaluating whether this is a potential hate crime.” She further said that “at this time, there is no known link between Morales and either of the victims, nor between the victims and each other”. Tisch added that the suspect has no r...

ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court on Friday settled a jurisdictional dispute by declaring that it could not hear bail applications in pending National Accountability Bureau (NAB) appeals, and all such pending criminal appeals stood transferred to the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC). “This court has no jurisdiction to take cognisance in the NAB cases in terms of Article 175F (a) of the Constitution, read with Section 32 and 32-A of the National Accountability Ordinance, 1999,” ruled Justice Muhammad Ali Mazhar in a 30-page judgement he authored. The ruling came on two petitions taken up by a three-judge Supreme Court bench, which was headed by Justice Mazhar and comprised Justice Musarrat Hilali and Justice Shahid Bilal Hassan. One of the pleas was filed by the NAB, challenging an acquittal by the Peshawar High Court, and another by an under-trial prisoner, Aamir Mahmood, who challenged the Islamabad High Court’s refusal of his post-arrest bail. More to follow from Dawn - Home htt...

The world is entering a period of rapid geopolitical realignment. The conflicts unfolding in the Middle East and along Russia’s borders with the West are not merely regional disputes; they are symptomatic of a deeper contest between two poles of global power — China and the United States — over the shape of the emerging world order. In this environment, smaller and middle powers risk being viewed simply as territory to be absorbed into one bloc or another. Russia and Iran are two states that deserve closer attention in this context. It would be a mistake to assume that their geopolitical weight can simply be written out of a new order defined by US-China rivalry. The outcome of that rivalry will, in fact, help shape the strategic and economic options available to other countries in the years ahead — Pakistan and Russia among them. Both nations share a concern for economic and technological sovereignty, and both have an interest in building new channels of cooperation. Before any dee...

Pakistan on Thursday rejected India’s attempt to “distort facts” about the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) at a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) open debate, saying that New Delhi’s actions in the aftermath of the attack in occupied Kashmir’s Pulwama were “simply illegal”. At a UNSC debate on natural resource governance, Pakistan’s Permanent Representation to the UN Asim Iftikhar Ahmad had highlighted India’s unilateral decision to hold the treaty in abeyance, saying that “no state should be permitted to abuse shared water resources as an instrument of coercion or political pressure, much less when it breaches solemn treaty obligations”. Subsequently, India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Harish Parvathaneni had accused Pakistan of “state-sponsored cross-border terrorism”, saying that it had “eroded the basis for bilateral cooperation on the treaty”, according to Indian news agency ANI . He had also asserted New Delhi’s claim on occupied Kashmir. In response, Pakistan...

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed on Thursday “stringent punishment” for those involved in exam fraud that has fuelled student anger, in his first direct comments tied to major protests challenging his government. The comments came after thousands of protesters, led by the social media-driven Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) movement, rallied in New Delhi on Wednesday, triggering fresh clashes with the police. “Nothing is more important than the welfare and future of our youth,” he said in a post on X, promising to set up fast-track courts to punish those involved in question paper leaks. “Those who try to harm the future of our youth will not be spared,” he added. The protesters, mostly young students, have been demanding the resignation of the education minister over exam paper leaks since last month. Protests snowballed on Monday after police fired tear gas and baton-charged tens of thousands of demonstrators as they tried to...

Tehran is red and black when I arrive. Millions of people in black mourning attire carried red flags, the stark emblem of blood and martyrdom, seeking revenge for their leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated on February 28. “We Must Rise,” declare the banners. War songs ricochet off the walls in streets punctuated by elegies on the martyrdom of Imam Husayn and his Companions at Karbala. This is collective grief channelled as state resilience. An elderly supporter I meet, Akbar Ali Jafari, puts it like this: “The war has given the Revolution a new lease on life.” The founding purpose is resurrected and its leadership cast as embattled defenders of the nation rather than an ageing, contested regime. A vehicle carrying coffins of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family members, makes its way as people attend a funeral procession for Khamenei. — Reuters In early July, a towering fist was constructed a few days before the f...