When Dr Mahrang Baloch was a teenager, she joined hundreds of families across Pakistan’s south-western province of Balochistan to search for her father, who was allegedly arrested by security forces and later killed.
Years on, the doctor-turned-activist became one of the most recognisable faces of a movement demanding answers about enforced disappearances in the province.
Now, she faces life behind bars.
A Pakistani anti-terrorism court sentenced Mahrang and fellow activist Sibghatullah Shah to life imprisonment on Monday after convicting them of terrorism, sedition and murder in connection with the death of a paramilitary soldier during a protest in the town of Gwadar in 2024.
The pair deny the charges and are expected to appeal.
Speaking to the BBC after the ruling, Mahrang’s sister Nadia Baloch said the family remained defiant.
“We will challenge this decision in the higher courts,” said Nadia, who is also part of her sister’s legal team.
Asked whether she had visited her sister in prison, Nadia paused.
“I don’t have the courage to see her,” she said, because she feels she has failed her by not getting Mahrang justice.
For Mahrang, 33, the issue of enforced disappearances is not merely political. It is deeply personal.
Her father, Abdul Ghaffar Langove, who was also a political activist, disappeared in 2009, when she was 16.
Nearly three years later Mahrang’s family received a phone call informing them that his body had been found in Lasbela district, in the south of the province.
“When my father’s body arrived, he was wearing the same clothes, now torn. He had been badly tortured,” she told the BBC in her last interview before her arrest in 2025.
The circumstances of her father’s death would shape much of her life.
