The men accused in Waseem Abbas’s murder and Laiba Ijaz’s fraud case are both dead in police encounters. I have ZERO sympathy for either, and I understand why this feels like swift justice. But we can’t let this become our idea of justice. How do we know who else was involved? And are we really comfortable giving the police THIS much power? Justice should mean people fear the certainty of being caught, tried and held accountable. Killing these men might satisfy public anger, but it doesn’t fix the system that allowed these crimes to happen. We’re just replacing one form of lawlessness with another.

The murder of 15 year old Waseem Abbas in Multan is sickening on so many levels. One of the cruelest things one could ever see. An orphan sent out to work, chased down and run over for trying to leave. What kind of depraved mindset makes someone feel so entitled to a child’s labour and his life? I wonder how much of that brutality comes from knowing just how vulnerable he was. No parents to question his treatment, no family to fight for him. And why was an orphanage sending children into such conditions in the first place? We talk about child labour as though it’s just about poverty, but it’s also about the enormous power adults have over children who have absolutely no way of protecting themselves. I hope the state pursues this case to the very end, because justice for this boy cannot depend on whether he has a family to demand it. It’s just so so tragic.