When the Classroom Becomes a Killing Field: The Mob Attack on Hazara Students at BUITEMS, Quetta

They came to study. They were met with fists, slurs, and the oldest hatred in Balochistan.

On a day that should have been ordinary, lectures, canteen lunches, the mundane rhythm of university life, a mob descended on two or three young Hazara boys inside the campus of BUITEMS (Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences) in Quetta. They were beaten. They were targeted not for anything they said or did, but for their faces, those distinctive Turko-Mongol features that have, for decades, made the Hazara people walking targets in the city they call home.

I want to ask you something. How many of you have had to face discriminatory behavior, even the threat of being killed, because of your identity, your skin color, your self-respect, or the particular shape of your eyes? How many of you have walked into a university and wondered whether you would walk out?

Have you ever thought that a person can be targeted and killed just because of their religion? That their body could be left in a crowded place with no one willing to carry it away? That their workers go unpaid, their students are harassed, their businesses threatened, their passports and identity cards blocked simply because of who they are?

All of this has happened to us in this city. It is still happening.

We wish that being Hazara were not a thousand crimes.

Who Are the Hazaras?

To understand what happened at BUITEMS, you first have to understand who the Hazara people are and why their eyes are enough to get them killed.

The Hazaras are an ethnic group with roots in the central highlands of Afghanistan, known as the Hazarajat. Many migrated to Quetta during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with further waves arriving after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and again following the Taliban’s rise in the 1990s. Today, around 600,000 Hazaras live in Pakistan, mostly in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province. Human Rights Experts

Three things mark the Hazaras out from most Pakistanis. First, they have East Asian features that make them easy to recognise on the street. Second, they speak Hazaragi, a Persian (Dari) dialect. Third, almost all Hazaras are Shia Muslims, while most Pakistanis are Sunni. This combination of face, language, and faith makes them what scholars call a “triple minority.” Human Rights Experts

That visibility, as we will see, has been their most dangerous vulnerability.

A University That Has Been a Battlefield Before

BUITEMS is not a new site of Hazara trauma. It is an old one.

On June 18, 2012, at least four people, including three students of BUITEMS, were killed and 72 others injured in a suicide car bomb blast that ripped through a university bus in Jinnah Town. The bus had been coming from the Marriabad area of the Hazara community. A police vehicle escorting the university buses was also hit. The banned Lashkar-i-Jhangvi claimed responsibility for the bombing. Dawn

The consequences of that single attack were catastrophic for an entire generation of Hazara students. Around 80 to 90 percent of higher education students dropped out of universities after university buses carrying mostly Hazara students were bombed in 2012 and 2013. As a result, all three main universities in Quetta were effectively made inaccessible for Hazaras. GOV.UK

One survivor, later studying at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, described what it meant to grow up Hazara in this environment: “I completed my secondary education in Quetta under fear. I was thinking every day, this might be the last day of my life. I could not focus on my studies.” After the 2012 BUITEMS attack, he left and never returned. “We are living in Quetta like a bird in a beautiful cage,” he said. Nchr

Yet, in the years that followed, young Hazara boys and girls made the courageous choice to return to these campuses, to reclaim a right to education that had been bombed away. The mob attack this week is a brutal message sent to those brave enough to have tried.

The Pattern Nobody Wants to Name

What happened at BUITEMS this week was not a random act of campus violence. It fits a pattern that human rights organizations have documented for over two decades.

The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi openly issues death threats to Hazaras through newspaper ads and describes them as wajib-ul-qatl, deserving of death. Hazaras are easily identifiable because of their Turko-Mongol facial features and high cheekbones. Wikipedia

Hate speech against the Hazara community by religious leaders and groups has been instrumental in further marginalizing the community, and this overt discrimination deprives them of their fundamental rights to public life, mobility, and economic activities. Nchr

The mob that attacked these Hazara boys did not come out of nowhere. They came out of a culture marinated for decades in anti-Hazara, anti-Shia ideology, one that has been allowed to fester in mosques, madrassas, and now, apparently, on university campuses.

A report by the National Commission for Human Rights stated that 509 members of the Hazara community were killed and 627 were injured in various incidents of terrorism in Quetta from January 2012 to December 2017 alone. These are not just statistics. Each number is a son, a daughter, a student who wanted nothing more than a future. Voicepk

April 2026: Violence Returns

The BUITEMS mob attack did not occur in a vacuum. Just weeks ago, in April 2026, at least two people from Quetta’s Hazara community were killed and another three injured after unidentified assailants opened fire on them while they were travelling back to Hazara Town from the Hazarganji vegetable market. Unidentified armed men riding motorcycles opened fire at their vehicle, killing two people on the spot. Dawn

The Hazara community was left shattered, afraid, and angry, particularly because the intense violence they had faced for so long had appeared to fade over the past few years. The community had begun to breathe again. The mob attack at BUITEMS this week answers that fragile hope with terrible clarity. Voicepk

The Cage Gets Smaller

I want you to sit with this question. If a Hazara boy is harassed, beaten, or attacked on a university campus, a space meant to be the great equalizer, where exactly is he supposed to go?

Hazaras are forced to restrict their daily activities to specific areas, Alamdar Road and Hazara Town, due to fear of persecution. They find it difficult to pursue higher education in Balochistan. They have limited access to healthcare facilities. They cannot freely go to shopping centers or earn their living outside these enclaves. Nchr

Both of their main neighbourhoods, Hazara Town and Marri Abad, are surrounded by walls, checkpoints, and Frontier Corps posts. They function as protected enclaves, but also as open-air prisons. Human Rights Experts

And now the university, the one place where a Hazara boy might dare to dream of an equal future, has been turned into yet another arena of violence.

We Wish Being Hazara Were Not a Crime

The Hazara boys who were attacked at BUITEMS were not soldiers. They were not a threat to anyone. They were students who made the extraordinary choice, in a city that has spent decades trying to bury them alive, to show up. To sit in a classroom. To believe, against all evidence, that education is a right that belongs to them too.

A mob disagreed.

The question Pakistan must now ask itself is not just who threw the first punch at BUITEMS. The question is who has been throwing punches at the Hazara people for a hundred years, and who has been looking away.

Until that question is answered with accountability, not condolence tweets, not press conferences, not suspensions of a few constables, the cage will keep getting smaller.

We have been patient. We have been silent. We have buried our dead with dignity and returned to our books.

But there is a limit to how many times a people can be told, in blood, that their existence is a crime.

Basit Chinggisi writes on human rights, identity, and the Hazara experience in Pakistan.