Arrested four employees on charges of manufacturing spurious drugs. PHOTO: FILE
The factory owner, recently elected as a member of Shikarpur Municipal Committee on a Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) ticket, has managed to avoid arrest.
A heavy contingent of police, led by Lakhidar police SHO Tahir Mehmood Qadri, raided the factory located on Shahi Bagh Road where drugs were being manufactured illegally.
During the raid, the police confiscated the drugs, packing material, and machinery worth millions of rupees, and arrested four employees, identified as Muhammad Rashid Rajput, Farooq Ahmed, Imran and Shah Muhammad. Later, the police sealed the factory and registered an FIR under sections 420, 482, 483, 468, 273 and 275 of the Pakistan Penal Code. The confiscated drugs include cough syrups, multi-vitamin tablets and syrups, anti-biotic syrups and tablets, calcium syrups, Calcee sachets, chemicals, stickers of various drugs and other material.
According to a Shikarpur-based journalist privy to the developments, the factory had been manufacturing spurious drugs for the last six months or so, and supplied them to medical stores throughout Larkana and Sukkur divisions, some parts of Balochistan and southern Punjab. The factory owner, Shahbaz Arain, was elected to the Shikarpur Municipal Committee from Ward-1 during the recent local government elections, he said. It was reported that the police had initially arrested Arain but later released him due to 'political pressure'.
SHO Qadri told The Express Tribune that two of the arrested employees, Rajput and Ahmed, belong to Lahore and are experts at manufacturing spurious drugs, while the rest belong to Shikarpur and were just packers.
Denying Arain's arrest, the SHO said the factory started operations some 15 days ago and drugs were being manufactured on a trial basis. He claimed that so far no drugs had been supplied to the market as yet.
However, Shikarpur district health officer Imtiaz Farooq Memon said the factory was illegally manufacturing homeopathic and herbal drugs, not allopathic ones. He said samples of the drugs will be sent to a laboratory to determine the quality of drugs.
Sources said the 'influential' factory owner was arrested on Wednesday night from his house near Suk Pull area, but was later released due to political influence. They claimed the police was earlier reluctant to register an FIR but did so after pressure from media persons.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 11th, 2016
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