Not every crime pattern documented in Pakistan’s recent history comes with a clear explanation. Some of the most disturbing ones are disturbing precisely because no one, including the police who investigated them, ever worked out why they happened at all.
A Wave of Axe Murders With No Motive
At one point, Punjab and the old North-West Frontier Province saw a sudden string of killings in which an axe was used as the murder weapon. The victims came from ordinary families – not wealthy, not politically connected. They had no apparent involvement in the drug trade and no particular link to any of the sectarian divisions that drove so much other violence in the same period. To this day, police were never able to settle on a motive: nobody could determine whether the killings were rooted in old personal feuds or something else entirely. The wave of murders started abruptly and, just as abruptly, stopped. Not one of the killers was ever caught. It stands as one of the more unsettling entries in Pakistani policing’s long record of unsolved cases – not for its scale, but for how completely it resists explanation.
Karo Kari
A second pattern, far better documented and far more deliberate, is karo kari – a custom specific to parts of Pakistan, found among some tribes in southern Punjab and Sindh in particular. When a family suspects, or simply believes, that an unmarried son and daughter from two families have an improper relationship, the families involved sometimes kill both of them quietly, treating the killing as a matter of restoring the family’s honor rather than a crime to be reported.
What makes the custom especially resistant to law enforcement is the silence built into it. Neither family speaks about what happened. Police, in the areas where this custom persists, typically have no knowledge that a killing has even taken place. The wider tribe or clan involved maintains complete silence on the matter as a point of principle, treating outside interference – police, courts, journalists – as a greater violation than the killing itself. It is, in every meaningful sense, a holdover from an earlier era of private, family-administered justice, one that has simply never been dislodged by the modern legal system meant to have replaced it.
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