Saira Baloch is among thousands of women in Balochistan seeking answers about men they say were forcibly disappeared by Pakistan’s security forces. She was 15 when she stepped into a morgue for the first time. All she heard in the dimly-lit room were sobs, whispered prayers and shuffling feet. The first body she saw was a man who appeared to have been tortured. His eyes were missing, his teeth had been pulled out and there were burn marks on his chest.
She couldn’t look at the other bodies. She walked out. But she was relieved. It wasn’t her brother – a police officer who had been missing for nearly a year since he was arrested in 2018 in a counter-terrorism operation in Balochistan, one of Pakistan’s most restive regions.
Inside the morgue, others continued their desperate search, scanning rows of unclaimed corpses. Saira would soon adopt this grim routine, revisiting one morgue after another. They were all the same: tube lights flickering, the air thick with the stench of decay and antiseptic.
On every visit, she hoped she would not find what she was looking for – seven years on, she still hasn’t.
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