A prominent Pakistani rights activist was shot dead by unknown gunmen in Karachi as she was returning home after hosting a seminar about human rights abuses in Baluchistan province, police said on Saturday.
Sabeen Mahmud, the director of The Second Floor (T2F) cafe which organises debates and art events, was attacked by gunmen on Friday after she left the venue in her car along with her mother.
She died on her way to the hospital.
Doctors said they retrieved five bullets from her body.
Her mother also sustained bullet wounds. She is said to be in critical condition, Dawn newspaper reported.
T2F had on Friday organised a talk on Baluchi nationalists who often disappear in the country's southwestern Baluchistan province.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has condemned the incident and ordered an investigation.
The brain behind Pakistan’s first hackathon in 2013, Sabeen had told the Wired magazine: “Fear is just a line in your head. You can choose what side of that line you want to be on.”
"Sabeen was a voice of reason, pluralism and secularism: the kind of creed that endangers the insidious side of constructed Pakistani nationalism," Raza Rumi, a rights activist who escaped an assassination attempt in March 2014 and now lives in the United States out of fear for his life, told Al Jazeera.
"In her work, she was neither a political partisan nor a power seeker but Pakistan’s state and non-state actors are averse to any form of dissent. This is why she had to be killed," Rumi said.
"Her death has simply reopened my wounds. She gave me support when I escaped death and now I feel even more scared to return to Pakistan. Her death is a huge blow to Pakistan’s civil society and social change movements."
