Two of Pakistan’s Most Baffling Crime Patterns: Axe Murders and Karo Kari

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 chiefly among tribes in Sindh and Balochistan, with a related version practiced in southern Punjab. The name itself describes the accusation: karo means a blackened man, kari a blackened woman, the language of the custom treating suspicion itself as a kind of stain. When a family suspects, or simply believes, that an unmarried son and daughter from two families have an improper relationship, the matter is rarely handled as a private grievance. In its classic form, the elders of the tribe or clan gather as a jirga and formally pronounce the killing as their verdict, lending the act the weight of a communal ruling rather than an individual crime – which is precisely why the families involved treat it as a matter of restoring honor rather than something 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. The stigma often follows the victims past death: those killed as karo or kari are, in many documented cases, buried without the ordinary Islamic rites of ghusl or kafan, without a headstone, and without a funeral prayer or fatiha said over them, the community denying them in death the same standing it stripped from them in life.

The law has tried, more than once, to close the gap that lets this custom persist. For years, killings carried out in the name of honor could be absorbed into Pakistan’s qisas and diyat framework, under which a victim’s own family – often the very relatives who ordered or carried out the killing in the first place – held the legal right to forgive the killer or accept monetary compensation in place of prosecution, turning what should have been a murder trial into a private settlement closed from the inside. The 2016 murder of the social media figure Qandeel Baloch by her own brother, who publicly admitted to the killing and cited the shame her online presence had supposedly brought on the family, pushed parliament to pass the Criminal Law (Amendment) (Offences in the Name or Pretext of Honour) Act later that year, mandating a minimum prison term even where the family chooses to forgive. Even that reform proved narrower than intended: courts have continued to find room within it, and in Qandeel Baloch’s own case, the very one that inspired the law, her brother’s conviction was ultimately overturned in 2022 after the courts found insufficient evidence that honor had been the motive at all, releasing him from the case that had briefly seemed to prove the new law could work.