KARACHI: A division bench of the Sindh High Court restrained the Federal Investigation Agency on Tuesday from arresting a cellular phone company executive allegedly involved in issuing a SIM card to an ‘impersonator’ who posed as Rahman Malik, the federal interior minister.
The Customer Care Executive of UFone Company, Sumair Ali Abbasi, moved the court, alleging that FIA Cyber Crime Cell has lodged an FIR against him. Alleging harassment by the FIA, the petitioner maintained that he was bound to entertain a request made by a caller to the company system and issue or activate a SIM after following a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).
Under the procedure, the petitioner was bound to make some verifications, check the details from the NADRA database and activate the SIM card accordingly, he submitted.
It was also maintained that no photo of the applicant or caller appears on the screen (during this verification process) and therefore an identification by photo could not be made.
The petitioner further maintained that the caller impersonated and identified himself to be Abdul Rahman Malik and not the minister of interior.
The petitioner informed the court that all this was done by a reporter of a television channel who wanted to expose the flaws in the system that issues SIM cards, its misuse in criminal and illegal activities, besides establishing that how unsafe NADRA’s database system was.
Abbasi said that he was summoned by FIA to appear on February 2 before the agency officials and record his statement as a witness in a case registered by the FIA Cyber Crime Cell but on Monday some people in plainclothes visited his residence and wanted to know about his whereabouts. He maintained that it was harassment as once he had been called to record his statement, a raid on his residence was undue intimidation.
The bench, comprising Justice Maqbool Baqar and Justice Nisar M Shaikh, after hearing the counsel for the petitioner also ordered for the issuance of notices to the federal secretaries of interior and information ministries, the director of the FIA in Karachi and other officials of the agency as well as the deputy attorney general for February 7. The court, while restraining the FIA from arresting the petitioner, asked him to cooperate with the investigating officer and not to make this order a pretext for avoiding investigations in any manner.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 1st, 2012.
COMMENTS
Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.
For more information, please see our Comments FAQ