All five young men whose bodies were found dumped in Turbat on Saturday were close friends and belonged to Punjab’s Gujrat district.
According to Express News, the bodies of all the victims were shifted from Karachi to Lahore through a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flight. The victims’ relatives and CCPO received the bodies at the Allama Iqbal International airport where moving scenes were witnessed. The bodies were later moved to their ancestral village in Gujrat.
Four of the victims identified as Usman Qadir, Danish Ali, Saqib and Qasim were residents of Khori Rasool Pur village while Badar Munir was a resident of Jalalpur Jattan. All the victims can be seen in a selfie which has lately surfaced on social media. According to sources, they were illegal immigrants who wanted to sneak into Iran en route to Europe.
No group has so far claimed responsibility for the massacre, though the banned Baloch Liberation Front (BLF) of Dr Allah Nazar had claimed credit for the November 15 killings in which 15 young men were shot dead execution-style in the same district of the volatile Balochistan province.
Human smuggling is a huge business in Pakistan and other South Asian countries.