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http://www.dawn.com/news/1177956/director-t2f-sabeen-mahmud-shot-dead-in-Karachi
Pakistan – Sabeen Mahmud – Women’s Activist & Human Rights Defender – Shot & Killed
By Asad Hashim | 25 April 2015
Karachi, PAKISTAN - Sabeen Mahmud, a
prominent Pakistani social and human rights activist, has been shot dead,
shortly after hosting an event on Balochistan’s "disappeared people",
in the southern city of Karachi, officials have told Al Jazeera.
Mahmud, 40, was the director of T2F [The Second Floor], a café
and arts space that has been a mainstay of Karachi’s activists since it opened
its doors in 2007. She was one of the country’s most outspoken human rights
advocates.
Mahmud was shot four times at close range, with bullets going
through her shoulder, chest and abdomen, police told Al Jazeera. She was
pronounced dead on arrival at the National Medical Centre hospital at 9.40pm.
Mahmud had been on her way from the event, along with her
mother, when her car came under fire from unidentified gunmen, according to
police.
Her mother was also shot twice, but was undergoing treatment in
hospital and was out of immediate danger, hospital officials said.
Mahmud had been present at the opening of a discussion called
"Unsilencing Balochistan," hosted at T2F, where prominent Baloch
rights activists Mama Qadeer, Farzana Majeed and Muhammad Ali Talpur had been
speaking.
Wounds 'reopened'
Qadeer and Majeed have long championed the cause of
Balochistan’s "disappeared," a term used to describe people who have
been abducted in Balochistan, with their bodies often found years later. The
Voice of Baloch Missing Persons organisation, which both activists belong to,
says that more than 2,825 people have "disappeared" in this way since
2005.
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They allege the disappearances, which are mostly of Baloch
rights activists and students, have been carried out by the Pakistani
government and its powerful ISI intelligence agency, a charge the agency
denies. |
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Just over a fortnight ago, a similar talk with the same
speakers at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), was
cancelled at the last minute “on orders from the government”, according to a
LUMS statement. "Sabeen was a voice of reason, pluralism
and secularism: the kind of creed that endangers the insidious side of
constructed Pakistani nationalism," Raza Rumi, a rights activist who
escaped an assassination attempt in March 2014 and now lives in the United
States out of fear for his life, told Al Jazeera. "In her work, she was neither a
political partisan nor a power seeker but Pakistan’s state and non-state
actors are averse to any form of dissent. This is why she had to be
killed," Rumi said. 'Brutal and blatant' A friend of Mahmud's in Karachi, who spoke to Al Jazeera on
condition of anonymity due to safety fears, said she had contacted him on
Tuesday to ask for advice about whether she should go ahead with the event. "She was having doubts, and the person
who had initially agreed to moderate the discussion had backed out,” he said. "We discussed the possible blowback
that she and T2F could potentially get in response to holding the event, but
I never imagined it would be as brutal and blatant as this." Another friend of Mahmud's, who raced to the
hospital minutes after she had been shot, said "at least a hundred
people" had gathered outside the hospital for the activist, within
moments of her arrival. "I raced through the hospital
corridors to get to the ER envisioning a defiant Sabeen who was going to
laugh at her own plaster or dressing," the second friend said. "She stood up and hosted an event for
a group of people who have no voice despite the threats she had gotten. She
did not back down - gave her life.
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