Inside Punjab’s CCD: Murder as Method

The Crime Control Department(CCD) is an extrajudicial execution apparatus, established by Punjab Government in February 2025, that has killed over 900 people since its inception while answering to no one and operating entirely outside the bounds of law. This is not a police force. This is what governance looks like when the state abandons rule of law entirely and replaces it with the machinery of state-authorized killing.

In June 2026, nine-year-old Hania Ahmed was shot dead by CCD in Chakwal while her family attempted to flee a scene in which they were victims, not perpetrators. Her father, Adil Ahmed, an Australian national, and his wife Dr. Sidra Khan had just returned from Hajj when they became caught in a firefight between CCD personnel pursuing robbers and the robbers themselves. Rather than distinguishing between suspects and victims, the CCD opened fire on the fleeing family vehicle, killing the child while critically wounding her father and brother. Following the incident, a CCD official was taken into custody, yet the child remained dead.

The case is not exceptional but exemplary of what the CCD produces when it operates without legal restraint or oversight. During the first eight months of 2025, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan documented at least 670 CCD-led encounters resulting in the deaths of 924 suspects, while only two police officers were killed in the same period, a ratio that cannot be explained as self-defence and instead reveals systematic elimination of suspects before trial.

The HRCP’s fact-finding report, titled “The CCD’s Role in Punjab” released in February, 2026, concluded that the CCD has adopted a deliberate policy of staged police encounters leading to extrajudicial killings that fundamentally undermine constitutional protections and the rule of law across the province. The commission identified the CCD as a parallel police force with sweeping powers to register FIRs, detain suspects, and carry out lethal operations. For months before the report’s release, journalists, lawyers, civil society organizations, and affected families had been raising warnings that the CCD was undermining constitutional governance.

The department responded to these warnings by dismissing them outright, denying any policy of extrajudicial killings and accusing the commission of possessing no evidence, yet the evidence exists in the FIRs themselves where across hundreds of encounters and multiple districts the narratives repeat with such consistency that they cease to be documentation and become script. More than two fatal encounters occur daily, and this frequency combined with the same narratives—suspects fire first, police return fire, accomplices escape—indicates orchestrated practice rather than isolated incidents of misconduct.

The HRCP warned that the normalization of such violence risks permanent damage to Pakistan’s democratic institutions and its standing in the international community, yet the killing continued unabated, and days after the HRCP released its devastating report the CCD reported its first encounter, maintaining all the while that it operates strictly in accordance with the Constitution and citing crime reduction statistics as justification for killing while more than 900 people lay dead, not arrested but executed, not tried but eliminated.

Why did the government create such an apparatus, and why did citizens accept the trade-off it represented?

The answer lies in exhaustion with a criminal justice system that has failed for decades, where courts are clogged with cases, trials take years, convictions are rare, and crime continues unabated, prompting the provincial government to offer an alternative logic: kill suspects before they reach trial, eliminate the accused before courts become involved, promise efficiency through execution.

Many Pakistanis, frustrated by a genuinely broken criminal justice system, accepted this bargain because they wanted visible action against crime, wanted the sense that something was being done, wanted the psychological relief of watching their government move decisively even if that movement was toward lawlessness. The CCD understood this frustration and exploited it ruthlessly, offering extra judicial killings as policy, promising quick results, delivering body counts and ultimately the death of a nine-year-old girl.

CCD operates with extraordinary powers; it can register cases independently, operate its own police stations, investigate major crimes, and use lethal force, but without meaningful judicial oversight or independent investigation when it kills, for when an officer takes a life the investigation is conducted by the same institution that employed the officer, a system of self-protection wearing the mask of accountability.

What happened to nine-year-old Hania Ahmed and her family was not a failure of the CCD but a success, proof that the department is functioning exactly as designed, which is to use force without restraint, without investigation, without consequence, eliminating suspects before they can reach trial or complicate the narrative with the inconvenience of their guilt or innocence.

The answer to a broken criminal justice system is not an execution department but judicial reform, prosecutorial capacity, professional investigation, and the restoration of due process, none of which the CCD offers because it was never designed to offer them but rather to replace the entire legal and policing system with extra judicial murders.

Pakistan’s police and legal institutions have failed for decades through corruption, inefficiency, and abuse, and the CCD has not reformed them but abandoned them entirely, operating outside constitutional constraints, answering only to political leadership, and normalizing lethal force as governance, establishing a precedent that once institutionalized becomes nearly impossible to reverse.

Until the CCD is held accountable and independent prosecutions are launched against those responsible for its operations, Pakistan remains a State that has authorized the killing of the innocent—until proven guilty—where the murder of Hania Ahmed represents a deep crack in the very system that was meant to protect her.