In October 2026, two suspects in high-profile cases were shot and killed after their arrests. The first, Tauqeer Nazir, was accused of running over and killing a 15-year-old orphan who worked for him in Multan; police claimed that he escaped custody before being killed in an exchange of fire. The second, Muhammad Nauman, was accused of defrauding a young girl’s family of their savings with false promises of education abroad, after which she was found dead in an apparent suicide; police maintained that he was fatally wounded when accomplices opened fire on a police party taking him for recovery. Both of the accused met similar fates, and while at face value the summary execution of those accused of such grave crimes may seem like justice served, it is nothing other than the substitution of the state’s judgment for that of a court. An arrested person, regardless of whether they are guilty or not, is the state’s responsibility and that cannot be discharged by attributing their death to another’s hand. Even on the police account, the question remains that the law requires someone to answer: how does a man already in the state’s hands come to be killed? Until that question is answered, and absent a proper inquiry, with independent evidence, including post-mortem and ballistic findings, eyewitness accounts, and any available footage, and not on the account of the officers involved, the circumstances of these deaths remain beyond the reach of judicial scrutiny.
Extrajudicial killings, the taking of a life without the authority of a court, are not foreign to Pakistan. For years, families have been told that a loved one died in an encounter, and for years the courts have struggled to say otherwise. In a fact-finding report published in February 2026, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan documented at least 670 encounters involving Punjab’s Crime Control Department during eight months of 2025. These reportedly resulted in 924 suspect deaths and two police fatalities. The Commission concluded that the pattern indicated a deliberate policy of staged encounters rather than isolated incidents of misconduct.
Constitutional Safeguards
The Constitution of Pakistan contains strict legal safeguards against such killings, a point worth bearing in mind when such encounters are repackaged and presented to the general public as justice served. It guarantees every individual subject to our law the right to be treated in accordance with it, provides that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty save in accordance with the law, and guarantees due process and a fair trial to anyone accused of a criminal offence. These fundamental protections are exactly what the deaths of the accused in police custody lack; due process, the opportunity to defend themselves, a fair trial, and most importantly, the chance to be found guilty before being punished. The law is more demanding still where the person is in custody. The Constitution protects the arrested, and the Torture and Custodial Death (Prevention and Punishment) Act 2022 requires every death in custody to be investigated by the Federal Investigation Agency under the supervision of the National Commission for Human Rights. The very function of courts, and broadly, of the entire legal system, is to determine guilt based on evidence, after hearing the arguments of both sides, by a judge who has no stake in the outcome. The intricacy and necessity of that process is undermined when the outcome of a case is reached outside the courtroom.
A Public Disillusioned with Justice
The public response to both deaths was one of celebration, with the killings received as justice served, and this reaction is not difficult to understand. The alleged crimes were cruel, and both the victims were young and defenceless; a teenager chased down in the street, and a young woman who took her own life after her family’s savings were taken. And in the face of that, the public has long since watched and has learned to expect little when cases like these last years on end, witnesses waver and alter testimonies, and accused persons walk free on bail. The people’s confidence in the justice system of the country has eroded and dissipated accordingly, and where the courts appear unable to deliver an outcome, an outcome delivered by other means is welcomed as relief. It also offers what a trial cannot, namely speed and apparent certainty. That reaction therefore deserves to be understood rather than dismissed, because it serves as a litmus for how far faith in the justice system has fallen.
Policing Without Accountability
The police occupy an uneasy place in this argument. Officers do face genuine danger, and both the police and the government maintain that the Crime Control Department has reduced serious crime. A fall in crime, even if shown, cannot justify an unlawful killing, and an allegation of one cannot be dismissed for want of proof when the state holds the evidence. If success is then measured by the number of suspects removed, and not by convictions secured on credible evidence, the incentive runs against doing that work at all. The encounter becomes the easier course, since it demands no case file, no witness, and no trial. A police force that takes it has not remedied the weakness of the system but concealed it, and in doing so leaves the same institution whose conduct is in question to account for it. That is why scrutiny of such deaths cannot rest with the police alone.
The Normalisation of Extrajudicial Killings
If the allegations are true, the harm done to the victims and to society was grave, and the accused deserved stern condemnation and subsequent punishment, but the responsibility for awarding and carrying out such orders is the sole responsibility of the courts. The failings of the courts do not transfer their function to anyone else, and public frustration cannot be an authority for the state to dispense; it should rather serve as a reason to reform the justice system. Guilt is established through evidence tested by both sides, and where that process is bypassed, nothing remains to distinguish the guilty from the wrongly accused, and such an error, once made, cannot be corrected, and thus the consequences extend beyond any single case. It, at its core, removes the pressure to repair the system. If an accused is never to face trial, the investigation need not be thorough enough to withstand one, and the prosecution need not be strengthened. The courts are left as slow and as poorly supplied as before, and the public’s distrust of them, which was offered as the justification, goes unaddressed.
Summary punishment, carried out and announced by the state, has historically been the instrument of regimes that rule by fear, because its function lies less in punishing the individual than in warning everyone else. The category of those who may be disposed of in this way also rarely stays fixed. These two men were notorious, and their deaths were noticed. The great majority of those killed in encounters were not, and whether their deaths were lawful is a question few are asking. A method accepted for the most reviled accused does not remain confined to them, and the question of where the state draws the line is, in practice, answered by the state itself. The next person may not be one the public condemns. Whatever its appeal, this is not justice, because it ends the very process by which justice is distinguished from retribution.
The Rule of Law Cannot Be Optional
The rule of law — the principle that the state is bound by the same law it enforces — is what separates a state that punishes from one that merely retaliates. Dicey’s conception of the rule of law rested on the supremacy of ordinary law over arbitrary power: no person could be punished except for a distinct breach of law established through the ordinary courts. Its significance here is straightforward. The police cannot acquire a power to punish simply because the institutions responsible for doing so have failed, and a state that kills outside the courtroom has not found a faster route to justice; it simply demonstrates that the law applies only until it becomes inconvenient. The answer to a slow and distrusted justice system is therefore structural reform, not substitution: effective trials that conclude within a reasonable time, and independent scrutiny of every death in custody. Anything less is not reform; it is the surrender of the courts, presented as efficiency. Public confidence will return when the courts deliver outcomes that are timely and credible, not when the state decides that it no longer needs them.
The deaths of these two men were received as justice, but justice is a process, not an outcome. Public approval cannot supply it afterwards. Whether the police account is accepted or disputed, the state owes an explanation of how two men it had arrested came to be killed, and that explanation belongs in an independent inquiry and ultimately before a court. Where the circumstances of a death are entirely within the knowledge of the institution responsible for the deceased’s custody, that institution cannot be the sole judge of whether its own account is credible. Independent investigation is not merely desirable; it is imperative to make accountability possible. The state is not required to choose between controlling crime and respecting the law; it owes its citizens protection from criminals and protection from the misuse of its own power. A society that wants its guilty punished must therefore insist that guilt be proved, since that is the only protection any of us has on the day we are the ones accused.