Mahrang Baloch Life Sentence

• On 22 June 2026, an anti-terrorism court in Quetta sentenced Dr Mahrang Baloch and fellow activist Sibghatullah Shah to life imprisonment. Both lead the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, a group that campaigns against enforced disappearances in Balochistan.
• The conviction is for the 2024 case. On 29 July 2024, a Frontier Corps soldier, Shabbir Baloch, died from injuries during clashes at a large Baloch gathering in Gwadar. The prosecution argued the soldier was attacked by the crowd.
• Mahrang Baloch is 32. She was named on TIME magazine's 100 most influential people list and nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. The state lists her as a "proscribed", or banned, person.
• The written judgment was still pending after the sentence was announced. She has been held for about two years across several cases.

Both sides agree on the bare facts: a soldier died at the 2024 Gwadar gathering, and a court has now jailed Mahrang Baloch for life over it. The real dispute is whether this is a murder trial or a political one, and that turns on evidence the public has not seen, because the written judgment is still pending. For now the persecution framing is by far the loudest, carried by a flood of activists, rights groups and international figures, while the government's "justice for a soldier" line is stated briefly and left to stand. Two things the loud coverage mostly skips: the family of the dead soldier, whose loss is rarely the headline, and the awkward fact that Pakistan's main parties have each defended and attacked anti-terrorism courts depending on who was in the dock.